Just Another Missing Person

“Julia cups her face in her hands, two jobs down, one to go, at pushing eight o’clock at night, and thinks about working in a supermarket. But the thing is, she wouldn’t love anything else. Not like she loves this. And nobody can have a balanced relationship with something they love.”

Julia leaves dinner with her family to begin Olivia’s case. The two “jobs” she refers to aren’t part of her job at all: taking care of Price and checking up on the suspicious man she saw at dinner. The fact that she sees them as part of her job shows that she sees no distinction between her personal and professional lives. She also admits, however, that this The Difficulty of Separating the Personal and Professional doesn’t allow balance in her life.

“The text to the housemates is what troubles Julia the most. Please come x. That text is a specifically female call to arms, sent with only one intention, Julia thinks: to be rescued. There are things you don’t just know because you’re police: you know them because you’re a woman.”

In another example of bringing her personal life to bear in her professional obligations, Julia understands this clue from Olivia’s phone through her identity as a woman, not a police officer. She recognizes the urgency of the message in a way that a male officer might not. Even though she is a police officer, Julia experiences several instances when, as a woman, she feels threatened.

“She has no choice. It’s Genevieve or this. And nothing tops Genevieve. That is what motherhood is.”

When faced with blackmail, there is no choice at all for Julia. She will protect her daughter. Yet by establishing Julia’s love and absolute commitment to her job in earlier page, Gillian McAllister underscores the difficulty of this decision. Genevieve is the only thing that could lead Julia to corruption, and the difficult decision highlights