As an old-fashioned grand hotel with abundant staff, a lively lobby and bar, and a continual influx of guests, the Hotel Nantucket facilitates human intimacy and interaction at an accelerated level. This makes it ripe for interpersonal romances and tensions between people who would not normally be brought together in other contexts.

In the staff, this is evident when the people hired are mostly strangers to each another and yet are quickly forced into intimacy by their daily proximity. Hilderbrand thrusts together unlikely pairs for maximum tension and social commentary. For example, on the housekeeping team, rich-boy-with-a-guilty-conscience Chad is paired with Bibi, a 21-year-old single mother from a disadvantaged background. Chad’s guilt over his privilege and the accident he caused means that he bends over backwards to cover for Bibi, taking on the more disgusting chores himself and even going as far as stealing his mother’s belt when it looks like Bibi has stolen an identical one. His obsession with doing “an honest job” collides with his sense that he has received undue privilege, both in terms of his wealth and the lack of punishment for what he did to Paddy (81). Bibi thus becomes a figure upon which he can project his wish for atonement in Paddy’s absence.