Gwen Applefield

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Greer Gallagher (born September 15, 1976) is a successful internet influencer, branching out into the self-help genre, who contacts her high school boyfriend, Cash Aldrick, to discover what happened to her father and to provide an alternate narrative of his life.

• Greer is motivated by a need to control the way people see her.
• Greer wants total control of her image.
• Greer is challenged by any seeming loss of control.
• Greer will discover how truly powerless she is.

Greer reaches out to Cash in a moment of weakness, having resisted the urge to find her father for many years, although she won't let Cash know of her uncertainty. Once she initiates his journey, she feels expelled from the process, and tries repeatedly to inject herself into the story. When she hires another person to keep an eye on Cash, that person accidentally causes Joey's death, further hampering Cash's investigation. Believing this loss of control to be a sign of things to come, Greer encourages Hélène to pursue Cash in order to distract him, but when Hélène begins helping Cash, Greer sees that she's lost all control.

Biography

Early life

Greer's parents bought the house she grew up in when she was four, moving from an apartment complex. The 600 sq. ft. house in East Dundee was supposed to be a stepping stone to something bigger and better, but after her mother left during Thanksgiving of 1979, when Greer was five, her father struggled to keep up with the payments on the small house.

Greer's childhood home on Van Buren Street in East Dundee, Illinois

Her father's physical abuse of her began within months of her mother's departure and continued until she left for college when she was 17. It was not until junior high that she began to understand that her father's mistreatment of her was different from how other parents treated their children; however, by that time, her father had also emotionally abused her so much that she could not bring herself to tell anyone about the abuse.

During the summer before her senior year of high school she worked at a pizza parlor owned by a woman named Desiree who was also abused as a child and who quickly recognized the signs of abuse in Greer. Although Greer would never admit to Desiree that her father abused her, she listened to Desiree whenever Desiree would talk to her about the effects her own father's abuse had had on her.

A few months later, Greer hooked up with Cash Aldrick at a Halloween party, one of the few parties she ever attended during high school. In addition to the physical attraction, Cash's life without parents appealed to Greer. Within a month of their first date, Gerry beat Greer more severely than he had in years after going on a three-day bender prior to Thanksgiving. Greer uncharacteristically reached out to Cash for help. They spent that night driving around the city of Chicago and then watched the sun rise at Glencoe Beach.

By that January, Cash had convinced Greer to leave Gerry completely, to leave early for college as soon as she'd graduated, and to never return. Greer was resistant to the idea at first, not wanting to leave Cash and her other friends and even Gerry, but she eventually agreed to the plan. She secretly applied to and was accepted into a pre-college program at Colorado State University. Cash bought her a one-way bus ticket for the morning after graduation and drove her to the station after one last sun rise at Glencoe Beach.

In Boulder, Greer quickly abandoned the plan to stay at a youth hostel once she saw the poor condition of the place. Instead, she bought some cheap camping gear and spent the next six weeks camping in the mountains. Being fully removed from civilization also helped keep her from trying to contact Cash. She read the collected works of Virginia Woolf after finding a beat up copy in the library discard bin. She decided in the wilderness to have people at college call her by her given name, Gwen. Following her three-week summer program, during which she lived in the dorms at CSU, she returned to the mountains and considered remaining there, until a bout of food poisoning landed her in the hospital a few days before her first-year orientation began.

Greer's roommate, Leslie Dunham, during that year was profoundly homesick, returning to her family every weekend during the school year, so Greer found herself largely alone again. She focused on her classes to distract herself from everything else. When she admitted to her roommate that she couldn't go home for winter break, Leslie invited her to stay with her family in nearby Castle Rock. Throughout the holidays, Greer saw a close-knit, healthy family, which reinforced for her the need to stay away from anything having to do with Gerry. She spent that summer living with Leslie's family as well, working at a coffee shop and helping to take care of Leslie's three young siblings.

It was her junior year in college when she met Bryan Applefield, a graduate student in Engineering. She had not dated much during the first two years of college, but Bryan was aggressive -- in a kind way -- when he asked her out. After eight attempts, she said yes.

Plot Synopsis

Get It All Back

One night, after drinking a bit too much during lockdown and after another fight with her husband, Greer DMs her high school boyfriend Cash, with whom she hasn't spoken in 26 years. At first, she tells herself it is just a bit of social media pining, but quickly she decides to make it professional by hiring him to look for her father, whom she has long assumed was dead. To justify it all, she turns it into a project for her social media presence, a less for her followers about the possibility of solving every mystery, finishing every story. Fearing, though, that Gerry's story will be too off-brand for her, she asks Cash to also "revise" Gerry's story.

Greer becomes quickly frustrated with the pace of Cash's investigation and reaches out to Randy, whom she learns about through Cash's rare Twitter post, to keep tabs on Cash for her. She also encourages Cash to post more online, to help improve his presence and thereby his business.

Greer engages with Cash through text mostly out of nostalgia, as their story never "ended", although she always attempts to make the communications seem to be about their business. She promotes his work through her social media, playing it up well beyond what it actually is. When she realizes that one of the cops who met with Cash is also one of her followers, she encourages Hélène to get closer to Cash, although she it taken off-guard at how quickly their relationship develops.

In the end, Cash and Hélène figure out just how involved Greer has been in the whole story, but know they can't say anything lest they reveal the connection between Randy's snooping and Joey's death.