When she sees Gat in the kitchen, with the sunlight hitting him, waiting with a rose he’d picked and dried for her, Cadence realizes she loves him. One day Cadence looks at him in a hammock and he seems like he is her “particular person.” She joins him in the hammock and they write each other’s names on the backs of their hands.Ĭadence arrives a week late for summer fifteen because she and her mother are busy dealing with the house after Cadence’s father left.

While huddled under a fleece blanket, Gat asks when Cadence got so pretty. They jump in the water, then scramble back into the boat while talking about sharks. He, Johnny, Mirren, and Cadence became known to the adults as the Liars.ĭuring summer fourteen, Gat and Cadence take out the small motorboat alone. She “could have looked at him forever.” From then on, Gat came every summer. Cadence stared at Gat, who seemed spring-loaded with energy. Cadence recalls how her very white grandparents were surprised to learn Ed is Indian the day he stepped off the boat with Carrie. Carrie’s husband left her when she was pregnant with Johnny’s brother, Will. There is also Gat Patil, who started coming to the island when they were eight. As the eldest grandchild, Cadence is the likely heiress of the island.Įvery summer Cadence lives on the island and spends her time with the cousins around her age, Johnny and Mirren. Each was given their own house on the island: Windemere for Penny, Red Gate for Carrie, and Cuddledown for Bess. His daughters Penny, Carrie, and Bess were tall, merry, rich princesses. He kept his wife, Tipper, in the kitchen and garden, or showed her off in pearls and on sailboats. Cadence comments on how her grandfather Harris came into his money after going to Harvard. They then pack bags to spend the summer at Beechwood Island. They throw away any trace of his existence in the house and hire decorators.

Mummy snaps at her to get a hold of herself. To watch him drive off makes Cadence feel like he has shot her in the chest. He says he can’t try to be a Sinclair any longer. The summer Cadence is fifteen, before the accident, her father leaves Cadence’s mother for another woman. She has suffered from migraines since an accident several years ago. Cadence is nearly eighteen and lives in a grand house with her mother in Vermont. Cadence says it doesn’t matter if money is running out, divorce is destroying lives, or pill bottles are clustering on the bedside table-because they are Sinclairs, and no one is needy or wrong. No one is a criminal, addict, or failure. They spend summers on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. The Sinclair family members are beautiful, rich, athletic, and tall. Narrated in the first-person perspective by the novel’s protagonist, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, We Were Liarsopens with Cadence introducing her family to the reader.

We were liars lockhart