The Girl on the Train characters

Appears from the start

The story's main narrator, a divorced woman whose life has unraveled into heavy drinking and blackouts. Each day she rides the commuter train into London and back, passing her former neighborhood, and from the window she watches a couple she does not know, spinning an idealized fantasy about their perfect life. Lonely and unreliable, prone to memory gaps when she drinks, she becomes fixated on the couple and is pulled into their affairs when the woman she has been watching disappears.

Appears from the start

A restless young woman who lives a few doors from Rachel's old house and is the wife Rachel watches from the train, imagining her as half of an ideal couple. Beautiful and discontented, she has drifted through jobs and is unsettled beneath her enviable surface. Her sudden disappearance sets the central mystery in motion.

Appears from the start

Megan's husband, the other half of the couple Rachel observes and romanticizes from the train. He appears devoted to Megan, but as she goes missing his intensity and jealousy draw suspicion, and he becomes an early focus of the investigation.

Appears from the start

Rachel's ex-husband, charming and persuasive, who left her during their marriage and now lives in their former home with his new wife and their baby. He is a recurring presence in Rachel's life, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes exasperated by her drunken intrusions, and she still measures herself against the family life he has built without her.

Appears from the start

Tom's new wife and the mother of their infant daughter, living in the house Rachel once shared with Tom. Content in her marriage and protective of her family, she is unnerved and angered by Rachel's drunken appearances and phone calls, and she narrates part of the story from within the household Rachel lost.

Appears from the start

A psychotherapist whom Megan had been seeing as a patient. Calm and professional, he becomes a person of interest once Megan's connection to him comes to light, one of the men whose relationship to the missing woman the investigation and Rachel both scrutinize.

Appears from the start

The police detective leading the inquiry into Megan's disappearance. Measured and watchful, he questions Rachel and the others, treating the intoxicated, inconsistent witness with wary skepticism as he tries to piece together what happened.