Mistakes We Never Made

Finn Hughes is Emma Townsend’s love interest in Mistakes We Never Made. They first met in high school, where they were on the debate team together, and Emma recounts the three “mistakes” they’d previously made throughout her narrative. As a character, Finn develops from someone who is unwilling to commit to a long-term partner to wanting to be with Emma and settle down.

Readers first meet Finn during Sybil’s impromptu bachelorette party, and Nikki compares Finn to Jesse Williams, a biracial actor from Grey’s Anatomy. Only a couple of references are made to Finn’s race; most notably, he points out that he was seen as more suspicious by a police officer when he got into a fight in high school. For example, when he remembers the fight to Emma, he says, “It was me and this white kid, and of course, I was the one that got dragged to the police station” (176). This provides important context for the additional stakes when a security officer comes over to break up a disagreement between Emma and another woman, and he assumes that Finn is the one who pushed her.

Finn’s and Emma’s stories are so intertwined that Emma’s flashbacks also give insight into how Finn has dealt with the difficult times in his life. Losing his father at a young age challenged him, and while Emma coped with her father’s departure by becoming a perfectionist, Finn’s father’s terminal cancer diagnosis made Finn feel that there was nothing he could control. He himself says that “I didn’t know how to deal with everything I was feeling” (176). Instead, when confronted with something hard, he steps back, as he does when Emma clearly wants to pursue a romantic relationship with him both in college and when he comes to visit New York later. He is afraid of falling short of others’ expectations of him and admits to Emma that “If you have no commitments, you have no one to disappoint” (310). He never let their relationship go any further because he was scared of hurting her. However, the weekend shows him that he wants to give their relationship a chance. Like Emma, he also decides to take a leap of faith and commits to their relationship by buying his mother’s old house.

Sybil Rain is Emma’s closest friend. They met in elementary school when Emma, attending a new school for the first time, was feeling self-conscious about her outfit. Sybil complimented it, and they became fast friends. Although this is Sybil’s wedding weekend, she has been engaged twice before, and her friends know that she can be very free-spirited, as is evident when she flees her wedding two days before it’s supposed to happen. While readers do not learn much about Sybil’s experiences during that weekend, Emma frequently reflects on why they are so close and comes to recognize how Sybil has always been there for her when she has needed it the most.

Sybil is an extrovert who is reluctant to let others see that she is hurting, and Emma recalls how Sybil could make people feel “[s]pecial. Chosen. Like her magical light might fall on you, too, if you just stick by her side” (7). She is easily swept up into a party, though Emma knows that, in turn, Sybil can also be somewhat undependable. When Sybil leaves the wedding weekend, it exemplifies how she “never considers any of the collateral damage she leaves in her wake” (42), as Emma, Nikki, and Willow all try to cover for her in Malibu. However, Sybil’s flakiness is likely also a result of not wanting others to see her hurt. Emma knows that “even when Sybil was at her most effervescent, she could be masking something much heavier than anyone she knew” (97). Her wedding weekend is her attempt to soothe herself, and she stresses to Emma that “[m]aybe I need to learn to keep myself in line,” showing Emma that their relationship can grow and change without ending (318).

A mystery that is never solved during the novel is exactly what brought Sybil to the hospital when she and Emma were in high school. Finn emphasizes that it was not his place to tell Emma, and Sybil still “struggl[es] to get the words out” when she starts to discuss it with Emma at the end of the novel (317). The novel sets up a sequel by implying that Sybil needs to be the one to tell that story, but for Emma and Sybil, Sybil’s willingness to begin telling Emma what happened shows that she does not want to keep things from her friend. Likewise, Emma’s attempts to respect Sybil when “[i]t seems like she’s still not ready to give me all the details” show how she is trying not to control her friends’ lives as much (317).