Where It All Goes Down
Beechwood Island, Massachusetts
Cadence lives in Burlington, Vermont during the school year, but the bulk of the action in We Were Liars takes place on a fictitious island called Beechwood. The island is off the coast of Massachusetts, close to Martha's Vineyard, where Cadence goes to the hospital after the accident. It's important that the setting is isolated insofar as Cadence's family is consumed by their own drama—the plot is helped along by the fact that the characters rarely see other people and instead are left to swirl around in their own heads and wealth.
There are four houses on Beechwood—Windemere, Cuddledown, Red Gate, and Clairmont, which becomes New Clairmont after the fire. During summer seventeen, most of the scenes featuring the Liars take place in Cuddledown, Bess's house, which she abandons after her daughter Mirren's death. This enables Cadence to get caught up in the world of the Liars; alone in Cuddledown, there's no one around to notice how strange it is that she's talking to ghosts/figments of her imagination/whatever it is that the Liars become after they die.