Opening
In these final chapters, Grace Angel stages a flawless performance that frees her from her husband’s control and saves her sister—while convincing the world she is an anxious wife on holiday. As her plan unfolds across past and present timelines, Jack Angel underestimates her for the last time, and Esther emerges as the unexpected witness who sees the truth beneath the facade.
What Happens
Chapter 21: The Performance
Grace waits outside her house for Esther to drive her to the airport, beginning the decisive phase of her plan. She tells Esther why she is traveling alone: Jack has lost the Tomasin case—his first-ever loss—and he needs to stay behind “to handle paperwork” and “lick his wounds in private.” The story fits perfectly into Appearance vs. Reality: Grace plays the devoted, worried wife while quietly orchestrating Jack’s downfall.
To make the lie airtight, Grace adds intimate detail. She confides that she and Jack hoped to conceive in Thailand and that Jack wants to be completely relaxed for it. She says Jack will be “incommunicado” for a few days to avoid the press, preempting any expected silence. She even arranges for Esther to visit Millie over the weekend so her sister won’t be alone. By the time Esther drops her at the airport, Grace’s composure, candor, and planning have cemented a perfect alibi.
Chapter 22: The Point of No Return
Flashback to Millie’s eighteenth birthday. After Millie Harrington and Janice leave, Jack unveils his true plan. He says he’ll pretend they’re all moving to New Zealand, send Grace and Millie ahead, and claim he was delayed—until he announces that they’ve “decided to stay,” when in fact he will imprison them permanently in the basement. When Grace asks about her parents, he replies, “I’ll probably just kill them.” The revelation redraws the stakes; escape isn’t enough. Grace must kill Jack to protect her family.
Jack adds that after Thailand he intends to move Millie into the house for good and lock her in the red room. The deadline clarifies everything. Jack wields terror as Fear as a Weapon, but Grace redirects that fear into strategy. She begins the next phase immediately, pretending to spiral—lonely, unstable, desperate for company—and persuades Jack into a new routine: a nightly whisky in her room while he vents about the Tomasin case. That private ritual will become the fulcrum of her plan.
Chapter 23: The Trap Is Set
Grace tests the sleeping pills she has secretly hoarded, learning she has enough to drug Jack but not to kill him. That means a harder truth: she must finish the job herself once he’s unconscious. She keeps building the nightly whisky routine, cultivating Jack’s trust and dependence. It’s a cold, precise reversal—Grace mastering Psychological Manipulation and Control using the very tactics Jack taught her.
On the eve of their trip, Jack returns tight-lipped: the jury will return a verdict tomorrow, and Thailand is back on. He ultimately loses the case—the witness Dena Anderson lied about a lover—and Grace’s window narrows to minutes. When Jack brings two whiskies upstairs, Grace crushes the remaining pills, distracts him with a feigned eye irritation, slips the powder into his glass, and swaps it with her own. After he drinks, she tosses her whisky in his face, bolts, and locks him inside the soundproofed red room in the basement—the chamber of his cruelty and the site of his Imprisonment and Isolation.
Chapter 24: Building the Alibi
Back in the present, Grace arrives in Thailand and executes her second act: the alibi. She checks into the hotel, explains Jack’s absence to the manager—who upgrades her—and starts creating a record. She leaves a loving voicemail for Jack that she knows he’ll never hear and then calls Janice to confirm Millie’s safety.
Over four days, she becomes the model of a wife who grows from patient to anxious to alarmed. She leaves daily voicemails for Jack, befriends a couple, Margaret and Richard, and gushes about her wonderful husband who will soon join her. She takes an overnight excursion to gather more witnesses to her solo travel. When Jack fails to arrive, she contacts his colleague Adam, guiding him—carefully—into being the one to raise the alarm. The concern appears spontaneous; the strategy is anything but.
Chapter 25: The Final Revelation
Grace’s performance peaks. With Margaret and Richard as witnesses, she reaches out to the British Embassy and police, distressed and persistent. Embassy officials finally arrive: Jack has been found dead, apparently a suicide. Grace collapses into the role of bereaved wife—because that is the role the world needs to see.
Back in London, she expects Adam and Diane but finds Esther waiting. Over coffee, Esther dismantles the official story. Jack didn’t die from an overdose; he regained consciousness and, trapped by the soundproofing, died slowly of dehydration. Then Esther does something Grace never anticipates—she coaches her on what to tell the police and promises to corroborate the alibi, saying she saw Jack wave goodbye from the window. When Grace, stunned, asks why, Esther’s question lands like a verdict: What color was Millie’s room? Red. Esther has pieced the truth together from Millie’s hints and chooses to stand with Grace.
Character Development
Grace transforms from captive to architect of her own freedom. Her courage, patience, and precision converge into a plan that protects Millie and neutralizes Jack’s threat for good. Her choices are rooted in Love and Sacrifice, not vengeance.
- Grace: Moves from reactive to strategic; builds and exploits ritual; controls her emotions to perform convincingly in two countries.
- Jack: Reveals limitless cruelty—imprisonment, murder, lifelong control—only to be undone by arrogance and the very prison he designed.
- Esther: Reframed from nosy neighbor to the story’s sharpest observer; she leverages The Power of Perception and Credibility to secure Grace’s freedom and shape the official narrative.
Themes & Symbols
Grace embodies Resilience and the Will to Survive. The dual timeline spotlights how endurance becomes strategy: hoarding pills, crafting routines, building social proof, and performing steady concern. Survival isn’t passive for Grace; it is planned, rehearsed, and executed.
Appearance vs. Reality governs every move. Grace’s public tenderness camouflages a lethal private objective; her alibi becomes the accepted truth because it is meticulous and socially credible. Esther’s intervention proves that truth sometimes relies less on evidence than on perception, empathy, and the willingness to act outside official channels.
The red room becomes the novel’s defining symbol: a site of terror turned instrument of justice. Jack’s end inside his own creation is poetic inversion—his power devours itself. Esther’s insight that Millie’s room was also red connects the spaces, unmasking the scope of Jack’s sadism and justifying the conspiracy of silence that frees Grace.
Key Quotes
“I’ll probably just kill them.”
Jack’s casual brutality clarifies that he doesn’t bluff—he escalates. The line sets the moral terms for Grace: stopping him isn’t retaliation; it is prevention. From this moment, her plan shifts from escape to elimination.
“Jack will be ‘incommunicado’ for the next few days.”
Grace plants a practical detail that carries legal and social weight. The word inoculates her against suspicion, converting Jack’s impending silence into a believable media-avoidance strategy and reinforcing the public mask of a dutiful wife.
“What colour was Millie’s room, Grace?” “Red,” I tell her, my voice breaking. “Millie’s room was red.” “That’s what I thought,” she says softly.
This quiet exchange reorients the climax away from violence and toward recognition. Esther doesn’t need a confession; she reads the pattern. Her choice to corroborate the lie restores power to the women Jack tried to control and reframes justice as communal, not institutional.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters deliver the novel’s catharsis through intelligence, patience, and solidarity rather than a conventional showdown. The past-present structure sustains suspense while revealing the mechanics of Grace’s plan, making the reader complicit in her deception and invested in its success. Jack’s death in the red room seals a morally fraught but fitting resolution: the abuser is undone by his own architecture, the survivor authors her freedom, and a perceptive ally ensures the story the world accepts is the one that keeps Grace and Millie safe.