Theo Corrigan

Nell's younger brother

Theo Corrigan is Nell’s younger brother by four years — the warm one, the one who could talk a traffic warden out of a ticket and himself into every kind of trouble. Three years ago he turned up at her door at the wrong end of a bad stretch, owing the wrong people, asking for a place to land. She turned the bolt. Neither of them has said the true version of that night since.

He isn’t a ghost and he isn’t a lesson. He’s a person who has been surviving on the far side of a city, at the same small hours his sister works, believing — because it’s the story he was handed — that she never wanted him back.

What he means to the book

Theo is the door. Not a mystery to be solved so much as a truth to be finally said out loud: the thing Nell has to tell a lock, and then a person, before either will open. What’s behind the last door isn’t a fix. It’s a first honest hour, and the chance of a second.

Voice

Only heard directly late in the book — quicker than Nell, gentler, quicker to forgive than she thinks she deserves. Wary the way people are wary of a thing they still want.

Appears in

Every Lock but Hers novella