Ruby feels overwhelmed with all this, so she skips school to take alcohol and drugs, and later finds herself in Nate's car when he picks her up.

One of Nate's clients, a high-strung woman named Harriet, offers Ruby a job at her jewelry store in the mall.

Harriet's business booms after a line of key-shaped pendants, inspired by Ruby's necklace, becomes an instant hit.

One day, Cora and Jamie inform Ruby that the police had found her mother unconscious in a hotel room and sent her to a rehabilitation center.

At the end of the novel, she stands in the backyard, and as Cora and Jamie are calling for her to leave for her graduation, she takes out the old key to the yellow house from the pocket of her robe and drops it into the koi pond.

[2] RUBY chose abuse and neglect as a key theme as she "...was really interested in taking on a different type of narrator.

It started out with Ruby not knowing the true meaning of family, only thinking that it meant people related by blood or marriage.

The concept of the English project sprung from her want to "...focus on the idea of family, and I thought it would be an interesting way to get Ruby thinking about it without it seeming too forced.