Rebecca

Maxim answers the telephone in the little room behind the library. While the narrator listened to Maxim’s confession, she accompanied him in her imagination as if she too killed Rebecca and sunk her boat. Part of her remained detached, focusing only on the fact that Maxim did not love Rebecca. She feels lighter and freer: “I knew then that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca. I did not hate her anymore. Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten […] She could not hurt me” (285). The narrator realizes that she can now sit down at Rebecca’s desk and not be frightened: “Rebecca’s power had dissolved into the air, like the mist had done. She would never haunt me again” (285). The narrator believes that Rebecca will never again stand behind her on the stairs or watch her in the hall. Even though Rebecca’s boat, with its prophetic name, “Je Reviens,” has been found with her body in it, the narrator feels forever free of Maxim’s first wife. She and Maxim can now be truly together: “I would never be a child again […] We would […] face this trouble together, he and I” (285).