“Hero for the Holidays” by Maisey Yates: Inadvertent multiple personality

“Standing next to the horse now, he looked at ease. In his natural element. And he was showing her [Fia Sullivan], in a thousand different ways, that he was actually an amazing father.

  “Maybe he would have been a good one the whole time.

Maybe the problem was you” (1, p. 214).

“He appreciated Fia in that moment on a level he hadn’t yet.

For her intuition as a mother.

“She had it all along, you just didn’t appreciate it when it conflicted with what you wanted” (1, p. 237).

Problem: Italics indicate a third-person response in the character’s mind to what the character had just thought. But since there is no omniscient narrator in this novel, who makes those italicized third-person responses?

Comment: Perhaps the author has “multiple personality trait,” discussed in this blog, and it includes an alternate personality who sometimes comments on the author’s thoughts; and so, the author, inadvertently, gave that kind of alternate personality to two of her characters.

1. Maisey Yates. Hero for the Holidays. Toronto, Canary Street Press, 2024.