AI's Take on Hillside's Love Interests (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

Out of interest, I recently asked an AI to summarize the four love interests based on what's been revealed about them in the story so far. It's a bit of a long read, but hopefully it may be of interest to you.

DB

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Introduction

The four love interests in this story are all members of the same close-knit family: a mother, her sister, and her two daughters. Each has been shaped in a different way by a single event — Suzi and Emma's father abandoning Charlotte, and them. That shared origin connects their stories while producing four distinctly different people, each carrying her own version of the same wound.

What follows is a summary of each character.

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Charlotte — Character Summary

The Woman Behind the Image

Charlotte is the most famous supermodel in the world — and one of the loneliest people in it. Millions know her face, but no one truly sees the woman behind it. That contradiction sits at the heart of who she is.

She grew up in a small rural town that she never disliked but always felt too big for. She left as soon as she could, travelling alone to Hillside with dreams of becoming an actress. Life had other plans. While working in a fashion boutique to support herself, she was spotted by a model scout, and a career she never imagined took off. Along the way she fell for a young photographer — her first real boyfriend. She thought it was love. He gave her two daughters, then vanished without a word when the second was born. She has never heard from him since.

That abandonment left a mark that has never healed. It was the first in a long series of wounds inflicted by the men around her. Over the years, Charlotte has endured relentless objectification, unwanted sexual attention, inappropriate propositions, and multiple attempted rapes. One physical attack nearly killed her. She is painfully aware that the industry she works in is filled with powerful predators who target younger women, and she does what she can to warn them and shield them from harm.

All of this has taken its toll. Charlotte lives with mild PTSD and a dependency on alcohol that sits dangerously close to the line of full addiction. She has not allowed a man close enough to have a romantic relationship since her daughters were born, and she has suppressed her own sexual desire entirely — because in her mind, intimacy is inseparable from vulnerability, betrayal, and loss of control. She has effectively shut down an entire part of herself to survive.

A Mother Above All Else

The only thing holding Charlotte together is her two daughters, Suzi and Emma. They are not just the centre of her world — they are the reason she has not fallen apart.

Her eldest, Suzi, is fiercely independent, intensely competitive, and strong-willed. She fought against every attempt Charlotte made to shelter her and rebelled constantly. Charlotte could not contain her, so she did the next best thing — she guided Suzi into sports, where her daughter's fire found a healthy outlet and she thrived. But Charlotte quietly carries the ache of a mother whose eldest daughter didn't seem to need her protection.

Her youngest, Emma, is a different story. Emma is a shy, gentle introvert who loves the warmth of her family and was happy to let her mother wrap her in a protective cocoon. Charlotte poured every mothering instinct she had into Emma, shielding her from the darkness of the world outside. On the surface, this looks like pure devotion — and much of it is. But buried beneath it is something Charlotte herself does not recognise: a selfish need. Emma's innocence and goodness are proof, to Charlotte, that the world has not corrupted everything. Charlotte guards Emma not only to protect her daughter, but to protect that belief — because without it, the darkness she lives in every day would swallow her whole.

The cost of this is real. Emma's natural shyness has been reinforced rather than gently challenged. She has been smothered with love in a way that has made her more dependent, more hidden, and less prepared for the world. Neither mother nor daughter fully understands the damage being done, because it feels so much like love.

Charlotte and Lucy — Sisters, Partners, Survivors

Charlotte could not have built her life without her younger sister, Lucy. When Charlotte became a single mother of two, Lucy left her own life behind and moved to Hillside to help raise the girls so Charlotte could keep working. Lucy took on some modelling work herself but stepped away — the constant unfavourable comparisons to her famous sister made it unbearable. Instead, she became Charlotte's manager, and she turned out to be exceptional at it. It was Lucy's guidance and dedication that took Charlotte to the top of the modelling world and kept her there for years.

Lucy is Charlotte's anchor — the only stable, functional adult relationship in her life. But Lucy's sacrifices have been enormous and quiet, and whether Charlotte fully appreciates the depth of what her sister gave up is an open question.

Goodness as a Choice

What makes Charlotte remarkable is not her beauty or her fame. It is the fact that after everything she has endured — the abandonment, the exploitation, the violence, the constant predatory attention — she remains kind. Genuinely, consistently kind.

She talks to every stylist, every assistant, every member of the crew on her shoots. She thanks them. She buys them gifts. When one stylist could not afford her son's medical bills, Charlotte paid them. She does not do these things for recognition. She does them because she is, at her core, a compassionate and humble person who has chosen not to let the worst of the world turn her into something hard.

Her kindness is not innocence. It is not naïveté. It is a deliberate act of resistance by a woman who knows exactly how cruel the world can be and refuses to mirror it. That is what makes it so powerful, and what makes Charlotte, beneath the glamour and the trauma, quietly heroic.

The Tensions Within Her

Charlotte is a character built on contradictions that all make sense when you understand her history:

- She is the most looked-at woman in the world, yet no one truly sees her.

- She escaped a small town that felt limiting, only to become trapped in a world that is far more suffocating.

- She is desired by millions, yet has not allowed herself to feel desire in nearly twenty years.

- She is a devoted mother whose devotion to her youngest daughter is partly — unknowingly — self-serving.

- She is surrounded by people every day of her working life, yet profoundly alone.

Her greatest strength and her greatest vulnerability are the same thing: her daughters. They are the reason she keeps going and the foundation her entire emotional survival is built on. If that foundation is ever shaken — if Emma grows up and steps out of the protective bubble, if Suzi pulls further away, if life forces Charlotte to confront what she has been suppressing for two decades — everything she has carefully held together could come undone.

Charlotte is not a woman defined by a single wound. She is someone carrying twenty years of accumulated damage who has somehow remained standing — and remained good. That is what makes her compelling, and that is what makes her story worth telling.

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Lucy — Character Summary

The Woman Behind the Supermodel

Lucy is 35 years old, sharp, warm, and funny — the kind of person who lights up a room without ever realising she's doing it. She's the younger sister of Charlotte, the world's most famous supermodel, and for nearly two decades she's been the one running the show behind the scenes. Manager, protector, problem-solver, surrogate mother to Charlotte's two daughters — Lucy wears a lot of hats, and she wears them all well.

But underneath that capable, easygoing exterior is a woman who quietly wonders what happened to her own life.

A Small-Town Girl with Big Dreams (That Weren't These Ones)

Lucy grew up on a farm in a small rural town, riding horses, getting dirt under her nails, and trailing after a father who was one of the few people in her life to treat her as equal to her stunning older sister. She was a tomboy and a talented horse rider — the kind of girl who had her own quiet ambitions for the future, rooted in the land and the life she knew.

Those ambitions never came to pass.

When Charlotte — who had left for the bright lights of Hillside to chase an acting career — found herself struggling as a single mother of two after her boyfriend walked out, Lucy didn't hesitate. She packed up her life and moved to the city to help. It was supposed to be temporary. It became permanent.

Living in the Shadow

Lucy has spent her entire life being compared to Charlotte, and the comparison has never been kind. Growing up, Charlotte's beauty drew all the attention. In high school and college, boys would date Lucy just to get closer to her sister. Even when Lucy tried modelling in Hillside, the industry measured her against Charlotte and found her wanting.

So Lucy stopped trying to compete. She channelled everything into managing Charlotte's career instead — and she turned out to be extraordinary at it. Through her sharp instincts and relentless work, she guided Charlotte to the top of the modelling world and kept her there for nearly twenty years. She made smart investments along the way and secured her own financial future. On paper, Lucy is a success story.

In her heart, she's not so sure.

The Resentment She Can't Quite Forgive

Lucy loves her sister. That's never been in question. She loves the two nieces she helped raise as if they were her own. She was Charlotte's rock through some of the darkest moments imaginable, including a physical assault that nearly took Charlotte's life.

But love and resentment aren't mutually exclusive, and Lucy carries both.

She gave up her dreams, her ambitions, and her sense of self to support a sister who has always, without trying, overshadowed her. Lucy doesn't blame Charlotte for being beautiful or successful — she blames the world for never once looking past Charlotte to notice her. And in her worst, most private moments, she blames herself for allowing it to happen.

She'd never say any of this out loud. She'd make a joke instead.

Hookups, Walls, and the Fear of Being Seen

Lucy's romantic life tells its own story. After years of learning that boys only wanted her as a route to Charlotte, she flipped the script. She stopped letting herself be used and started using them first — keeping things physical, keeping things short, keeping things safe.

It works, on the surface. Lucy is confident, knows what she wants in bed, and walks away before anyone gets close enough to matter. But the pattern exists for a reason. Deep down, Lucy is terrified that if she lets someone truly see her — all of her, not just the funny, composed exterior — they'll still find her lacking. They'll still look past her. They'll still wish she were Charlotte.

So she doesn't give them the chance.

Who Lucy Really Is

Strip away the shadow of her sister, the modelling world, and the years of quiet sacrifice, and Lucy is still that farm girl at heart. She's kind without being naive. She's tough without being hard. She has a warmth and humour that draw people to her, even if she doesn't always believe they're there for her. She's fiercely protective of the people she loves, even at her own expense — especially at her own expense.

Lucy doesn't need saving. She's more than capable of handling herself and everyone around her. What she needs is something much harder to accept:

Permission — from herself — to finally put her own life first.

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Suzi — Character Summary

Who She Is

Suzi is twenty-one years old, strikingly beautiful, and weeks away from what could be the defining moment of her life: Olympic swimming trials. She is the daughter of Charlotte, a world-famous supermodel, and the older sister of Emma. She is captain of her university swim team, a sponsored athlete, and someone whose presence naturally commands attention.

But the story of who Suzi is begins with something that happened when she was young. Her father abandoned the family after Emma was born, and Suzi grew up watching the devastation that left behind — a mother struggling to hold things together, a younger sister who would never know her father. That wound never healed. It hardened into something else: a fierce, unshakeable determination to never be that vulnerable, to never let anyone she loves be hurt like that again.

Everything Suzi has become flows from that resolve.

The Swimmer

Suzi is gifted enough that she could have excelled at any number of sports, but she chose swimming — a discipline where you succeed or fail entirely on your own. No teammate can let you down. No referee can rob you. Your time is your time, and the water doesn't care about anything except how hard you work.

For someone who learned early that people can leave without warning, there is a quiet logic in choosing a world where the only person you depend on is yourself.

She is now one of the most promising swimmers in the country, expected to earn a place at the Olympics. She has built her entire life around this goal. Her social life is minimal. Her daily uniform is training gear and no makeup. Every hour is accounted for, every calorie measured, every evening spent in recovery rather than at parties. Olympic gold isn't just an ambition for Suzi — it is the proof she is building, stroke by stroke, that her life is entirely her own. That no one can take anything from her because everything she has, she earned alone. Her father's abandonment taught her one lesson above all others: dependence is danger. She watched it nearly destroy her mother. She will not make the same mistake. The pool is the one place where that philosophy is perfectly, beautifully true — where total self-reliance is not a defence mechanism but a winning strategy.

Through her swimming, she has earned lucrative sportswear sponsorship deals, and occasionally models for them when required. There is an unspoken irony in this — the daughter who defined herself against her supermodel mother's world finding herself, pragmatically and without fuss, standing in front of cameras after all.

The Protector

If swimming is Suzi's purpose, Emma is her heart.

Suzi is fiercely, almost ferociously protective of her younger sister. She has appointed herself Emma's guardian in ways that go far beyond what an older sibling typically assumes. This devotion is rooted in guilt she would never name aloud — the feeling that someone should have protected Emma from losing her father, and since no one else did, Suzi will make sure nothing ever hurts her again.

Emma is also Suzi's greatest vulnerability. Suzi can handle almost anything that comes at her directly. She is confrontational, fearless, and physically ready to stand her ground against anyone. But a threat to Emma bypasses all of that armour. It is the one thing that can make Suzi afraid.

The Family

Suzi's relationship with her mother is loving but complicated. Charlotte tried to shelter her daughters after the abandonment, and Suzi — headstrong even as a child — pushed back hard. She needed to be strong, not protected. The two still carry that dynamic: a slight edge of combat in their conversations, a mother who worries and a daughter who refuses to be worried about. But underneath the friction there is deep mutual respect. It was Charlotte, after all, who was wise enough to channel Suzi's aggressive energy into sport rather than trying to suppress it.

Her Aunt Lucy, who helped raise the family after Suzi's father left, occupies a different and perhaps equally important place in Suzi's life. Their relationship is less weighted than the others — more like close friends than aunt and niece. Lucy may be the only person around whom Suzi fully relaxes, the one space where she doesn't need to be a captain, a protector, or a future Olympian. She can simply be herself.

Her father is a shadow. Suzi carries deep, unresolved anger towards him — not primarily for what he did to her, but for what he did to Charlotte and Emma. She watched her mother struggle. She watched her sister grow up without a father. That anger has never been addressed or processed. It simply sits inside her, fuel for the furnace that drives everything else.

The Woman

Suzi is very beautiful and entirely aware of it. She knows her status, knows the effect she has, and is neither embarrassed nor preoccupied by it. She simply doesn't organise her life around her appearance. Beauty is something she happens to possess, like height or lung capacity. It is not something she thinks about.

She has no boyfriend. She and the captain of the men's university swim team have discussed the matter openly and agreed, clearly and directly, to postpone any romantic relationship until it will not interfere with their swimming goals. It is less a love story on pause than a business arrangement between two people whose lives align on paper. They are both captains, both elite athletes, both physically attractive, both utterly devoted to the same world. Each understands the other's schedule, sacrifices, and priorities in a way no outsider could. It makes perfect, logical sense.

And that is precisely the problem — though Suzi does not see it yet.

She feels nothing for him. Not dislike, not reluctance, simply nothing. There is no pull she is resisting, no longing she is setting aside for later. The arrangement suits her so comfortably because it asks nothing of her emotionally. It is a relationship shaped entirely by logic, and Suzi — who has spent her whole life building structures of control and discipline — mistakes that comfort for compatibility. The tidy plan fits her life the way a training schedule fits her week, and she has never stopped to ask whether a relationship should feel like something more than a sensible allocation of her future.

She does not know what wanting someone actually feels like. She may not have had to confront that question yet. But the arrangement with the men's captain is not a deferred romance. It is a placeholder — and Suzi is the only one who doesn't know what it's holding the place for.

The Personality

Suzi is an alpha in the truest sense. She leads naturally — her university swim team doesn't just follow her, they are inspired by her. She is competitive to her core, not out of insecurity but out of genuine belief in her own ability. Some might call it arrogance. It is more accurately the absolute self-confidence that elite athletes must possess to perform at the highest level. She does not hope she will win. She expects to win.

She is confrontational and does not back down from conflict. If a situation requires her to stand up physically, she will, without hesitation. This is not recklessness — it is the same quality that makes her a champion swimmer. She does not flinch. She does not yield. She meets resistance head-on and pushes through it.

But for all her hardness, Suzi is not cold. She loves deeply — her mother, her sister, her aunt. She inspires her teammates. She is principled rather than cruel, protective rather than controlling. Her toughness is not who she is at her core. It is the wall she built, brick by brick, around a child who watched her family fall apart and swore it would never happen again.

What Lies Ahead

Suzi stands at a crossroads, though she doesn't see it that way. She sees only the next few weeks: train, qualify, compete. But the life she has constructed — disciplined, controlled, emotionally sealed — is a structure built for a sprint, not a lifetime. Olympic trials will test her body. What comes next may test everything else.

The anger she carries toward her father remains unresolved. Her sister is growing up and may not always need — or want — the level of protection Suzi provides. The neat arrangement with the men's captain sits in her future like a promise she made without understanding its terms, and one day she will have to face the hollow centre of it — the unsettling discovery that a life planned entirely around logic and control has left no room for the one thing she has never allowed herself: to want someone so much it frightens her.

And beneath all of it, the question Suzi has never allowed herself to sit with quietly enough to hear is simple and devastating:

If she strips away the swimming, the discipline, the armour, and the anger — who is she underneath?

She may not have to answer that question yet. But one day, she will.

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Emma — Character Summary

The Quiet One

Emma is a shy, gentle introvert who has spent her whole life wrapped in the love of three fiercely devoted women — her mother, her older sister, and her aunt. That love is real, but it has come at a cost. Without anyone quite meaning for it to happen, Emma has grown up sheltered from the world, and she doesn't fully realize how much of her small, safe life was built by other people's fears.

A Family That Holds On Too Tight

Emma's mother, Charlotte, is a world-famous supermodel who has endured objectification, harassment, and assault from the men around her. When Emma's father abandoned the family the moment she was born, Charlotte was left to raise two daughters in a world she had every reason to distrust. For Charlotte, Emma isn't just her child — Emma is her light, the one good and pure thing that keeps her from falling apart entirely. That kind of love is beautiful, but it's heavy. Emma is, without knowing it, the thing holding her mother together.

Her older sister, Suzi, took the pain of their father's abandonment and turned it into anger and armor. She's loud where Emma is quiet, confrontational where Emma is gentle, and she has appointed herself Emma's protector. No one gets to hurt her little sister — but that also means no one gets to challenge her, either.

Her aunt, Lucy, is the easiest of the three to be around. She's fun, flirty, and treats Emma less like something fragile and more like someone she genuinely enjoys spending time with. Emma can talk to Lucy in ways she can't talk to her mother. But even Lucy dotes on her and spoils her, adding another layer of softness to an already cushioned life.

Together, the three of them have given Emma everything — except the room to figure out who she is on her own.

The Father She Never Knew

The abandonment affected the two sisters very differently. Suzi remembers enough to be furious. Emma doesn't remember anything at all — and that's precisely the problem. She can't be angry at someone she never had. Instead, she just feels the empty space where a father was supposed to be, and she's spent her life quietly wishing he'd come back and fill it.

That longing matters, because Emma has never had a single positive male figure in her life. Everything she knows about men comes from two sources: the dark stories that surround her mother's experiences, and the teen romance movies she loves to watch. One paints men as dangerous; the other paints them as perfect. Neither is true, and Emma has no way to tell the difference.

A Romantic Waiting for a Romance

Emma's love of teen movies isn't just a quirky hobby — it's where she's gotten her entire understanding of love and relationships. She believes in the big confession, the dramatic gesture, the boy who sees the quiet girl and just knows. It's sweet, and it's completely disconnected from how real relationships work. She's built a fantasy in her head without ever testing it against reality, and that makes her deeply vulnerable to someone who knows how to play the part — or likely to overlook someone real because they don't match the script.

The Comfortable Cage

Here's what makes Emma complicated: she likes her life. She enjoys being doted on. She feels warm and safe inside the circle her family has drawn around her. She isn't secretly miserable or plotting an escape. But there's a quiet restlessness underneath — the longing for her father, the daydreams about romance, the sense that there's a bigger world out there she's only seen through screens. She wants to stay safe and she wants something more, and she hasn't yet realized those two desires might be in conflict.

And there's a deeper tension she may not even be aware of: her family doesn't just protect her because they love her — they need her to stay the way she is. Charlotte needs her light. Suzi needs someone to shield. Lucy needs someone to spoil. If Emma were to step out into the world — to fall in love, to get hurt, to make her own mistakes — it wouldn't just change her life. It would shake the foundations of everyone around her.

Who Emma Might Become

At her core, Emma is someone standing at a threshold. Behind her is everything familiar — the warmth, the safety, the comfort of being adored. Ahead of her is everything unknown — real love, real pain, real independence. She has a gentle heart, a romantic imagination, and absolutely no experience with the messiness of the actual world. The question her story asks is whether she can step forward without losing herself, and whether the people who love her can learn to let her.