The Accountant 2, a sequel to Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 action thriller starring Ben Affleck, is set to continue the story of Christian Wolff. For the movie to do its forerunner justice, one character vital to the plot of The Accountant – Justine – needs to be included. That’s in spite of the fact that Justine was barely in the first film.

While a couple and their young son attend the Harbor Neuroscience center that Affleck’s Christian Wolff visited as a child, the son wanders into a resident’s room. “Hello, Dreamboat,” the resident tells her visitor via a computer. It’s a callback to earlier in the movie, when Wolff himself was speaking to what sounded like an AI machine which greeted him with the same expression. In fact, Wolff wasn’t speaking to a machine. He was speaking to Justine, the Harbor Neuroscience resident he himself met as a child, who The Accountant’s ending reveals to be his close friend and partner.

The Accountant Revealing Justine As Christian’s Partner Makes Her More Important In The Sequel

Wolff Needs Her There Both For His Mission And His Personal Wellbeing

The first clue that Justine and Wolff know each other as adults appears when we see the jigsaw puzzle Wolff completed on his childhood visit to Harbor – with the help of a little girl – on her bedroom wall. It shows the boxer Muhammad Ali standing over a defeated Sonny Liston in the ring. This image is a touching full-circle moment, as we realize that Wolff found the missing jigsaw piece in his life in that same little girl he met when he was young.

Justine has non-verbal autism, but she is clearly brilliant with tech, as is evidenced by the power of her BX32 and the programming tasks Wolff has her carry out while speaking to her from his car. Yet, she’s actually more than just his tech wizard, helping him to detect fraud throughout The Accountant. She deeply cares about her longtime partner in crime, as evidenced by the concern she shows that Wolff might endanger himself trying to protect his fellow accountant Dana Cummings. “She’s not your problem,” Justine advises him, after a worried pause.

The twist at the end of The Accountant revealing the idenтιтy of Justine means that she absolutely has to be included in the film’s sequel, both for Wolff’s next mission to succeed and for the movie to carry the same emotional resonance. Alison Wright, the actor who played Justine in the first movie, hasn’t yet been confirmed in the cast for The Accountant 2. But it’s impossible to imagine the film without her.

Now The Truth Is Out, The Accountant 2 Can Dive Deeper Into Christian & Justine’s Relationship

The Accountant Kept Justine A Secret For Most Of The Movie

Because Justine’s idenтιтy as Christian Wolff’s partner was kept secret until The Accountant’s final twist, it couldn’t really explore the nature of the pair’s relationship. All we have to go on is some brief repartee in the middle of the film. Now that the secret’s out there already, this year’s sequel can put Justine front-and-center, and make Wright one of the movie’s lead performers.

We already know that the nature of Wolff’s mission in The Accountant 2 is going to be fairly similar to the first film, so he’ll need every bit of help he can get from his secret weapon on the tech side of his work. It remains to be seen exactly how much interaction we get between Christian and Justine beyond the mission, though. Either way, Wolff’s partner will be getting the credit she deserves from the very start.