Rachel Harmon has experienced a fair amount of loss in her relatively short life. She's already lost both of her parents, one of them right in front of her. Pemberton, the father of Rachel's child, brutally stabbed Rachel's father to death after he confronted him about getting his daughter pregnant. As one can imagine, this was a deeply traumatic event for Rachel; this is something that no one should ever have to witness.

But as the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and there's no doubt that, over the course of the book, Rachel becomes a much stronger character for having endured such emotional suffering. It hasn't been easy, but Rachel's been able to insulate herself from the emotional pain of loss by developing a coping strategy based around forgetting the personal details of those she has lost:

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

As this excerpt shows, Rachel can never completely get over her grief; the pain, the "barbed wire", if you will, will always be there. But because of her growing maturity and because Rachel's developed into a much stronger, more formidable person, she's now in a position to deal with her emotional pain in a far more effective way that most people would in her situation.