Caro Morton

Quick Facts

• Role: Fiancée of Grace Bernard’s childhood best friend, Jimmy Latimer; a personal antagonist who upends Grace’s closest bond
• First appearance: A bar in Maida Vale, where her cool poise instantly puts Grace on edge
• Background: Privileged, public-facing family (politician father, famous writer mother); high-powered corporate law job
• Key relationships: Jimmy (fiancé), Grace (rival), Sophie and John Latimer (future in-laws)

Who They Are

From the moment Caro Morton glides into Jimmy’s life, she embodies a kind of effortless, upper-class certainty that Grace cannot imitate or overcome. Ethereal, expensive, and unflappable in public, Caro’s presence isolates Grace from the one relationship she’s counted on. She doesn’t just represent competition for Jimmy’s affection—she represents the entitled social world Grace loathes and fears will always outrank her. While the Artemis family embodies the plot-level engine of Revenge and Vengeance, Caro is the intimate, domestic obstacle: a threat to Grace’s fragile sense of Family, Betrayal, and Belonging.

Personality & Traits

Caro’s charisma masks a stormier interior. Grace sees through the polish to the volatility underneath, but crucially, Caro also sees through Grace—weaponizing insight with surgical cruelty. The result is a rivalry driven as much by class friction and perception as by love.

• Superior poise with a cutting edge: Raised by famous, powerful parents, Caro wears entitlement lightly but unmistakably. Her breezy job summary—calling herself “the organiser if Nike wanted to buy Adidas”—reduces specialist work to a status flex, neatly patronizing Grace.
• Possessive strategist: Caro integrates into Jimmy’s life at speed (moving in, setting routines), then isolates Grace—labeling her a “weird sister wife”—to shut down the only rival who genuinely matters.
• Perceptive and cruel: During their balcony showdown, Caro skewers Grace’s liminal status with the Latimers—“part of the family, but…not really”—a diagnosis that’s both accurate and designed to humiliate.
• Volatile and unhappy: Behind the sleek façade, Grace observes an eating disorder, drug use, and violent mood swings (including shoving Jimmy at the engagement party). Caro’s pursuit of a “normal” man reads as a bid for safety she can’t internally sustain.
• Ethereal upper-class aesthetic: Cream silk shirts, wide-leg trousers, meticulously “careless” posh-girl hair, and long red hair (dyed) project understated luxury—beauty curated to look effortless.

Character Journey

Caro arrives as a force of displacement: her swift, possessive closeness with Jimmy sidelines Grace, turning latent anxieties into open conflict. The engagement party exposes the fault lines—Caro’s brittle control, Jimmy’s enthrallment, Grace’s growing desperation—and the balcony confrontation lays everything bare. Caro voices the truths Grace fears most, then, in a drugged and drunken blur, loses her balance and falls. Even in death, Caro’s influence endures: Jimmy’s instant assumption of Grace’s guilt triggers Grace’s arrest and wrongful conviction. Caro’s arc is static but catalytic—she doesn’t change, yet she changes everything.

Key Relationships

• Jimmy Latimer: Caro dominates the pace and tone of the relationship—moving fast, setting terms, and expecting compliance. Jimmy’s infatuation reads as awe at her beauty and status, but it also leaves him unguarded against her volatility (like the public shove at the engagement party). His immediate belief in Grace’s culpability after the fall is Caro’s last, indirect act of control over the triangle.
• Grace Bernard: Their bond is open warfare cloaked in social nicety. Caro quickly identifies Grace as the real rival—not a jealous onlooker but a quasi-family member whose history with Jimmy could eclipse a fiancée’s. On the balcony, Caro’s barbed clarity (“you’re…not really family”) strips Grace of her story about belonging, precipitating the tragic accident and Grace’s undoing.
• The Latimers (Sophie and John): Sophie’s delight at Caro’s pedigree fast-tracks acceptance. Caro fits the Latimers’ world—polish, connections, “good” family—so completely that Grace becomes surplus. Their approval doesn’t just legitimize the engagement; it legitimizes Caro’s authority to redefine boundaries and push Grace out.

Defining Moments

Caro’s scenes intensify quickly, each tightening the vise on Grace’s imagined future.

• First meeting in Maida Vale: Caro’s cool dismissal and immaculate style establish the tone—she’s already operating from a higher social rung. Why it matters: Grace recognizes instantly that she’s outclassed on optics as well as influence.
• Moving in with Jimmy: Caro consolidates intimacy and control simultaneously. Why it matters: By reconfiguring Jimmy’s daily life, she makes Grace’s presence anomalous—then inappropriate.
• The engagement party meltdown: Drunk and high, Caro publicly shoves Jimmy and targets Grace with open hostility. Why it matters: The façade cracks, revealing the volatile core Grace suspected—and raising the stakes from rivalry to danger.
• Balcony confrontation: Caro crystallizes Grace’s deepest insecurity—her conditional place with the Latimers—and perches on the railing as if daring fate. Why it matters: The physical precariousness mirrors the social one; Caro chooses the battleground and the terms.
• The fall and its aftermath: Caro slips and dies; Grace is the only witness. Why it matters: Caro’s death accomplishes what her life set in motion—Grace’s isolation becomes total, culminating in arrest and wrongful conviction.

Essential Quotes

“You don’t get to have an opinion here, you fucking single white female. Wearing green to upstage me at my own engagement party. Christ, I shouldn’t even have to indulge your jealousy and delusions. Everyone’s a wreck, Grace, you should understand that.”

Caro weaponizes classed femininity—policing dress, staging, and “appropriate” deference—while dismissing Grace as a copycat interloper. The final line reframes cruelty as worldliness: Caro’s nihilism (“everyone’s a wreck”) justifies her entitlement to control the scene.

“Jimmy loves you, you’re like a weird sister wife, aren’t you? Always around, but not quite his. Part of the family, but you’re not – not really. Sophie is obsessed with a good deed. You were just one of them. Why didn’t you take the hint when you hit 18 and slink off? A grown adult with a boring job isn’t quite the prize that a child with a dead mother is. You’re no use.”

This is Caro at her most incisive and cruel. She names Grace’s liminality—kept close as a charitable project, never fully belonging—and turns history into humiliation. The speech pries open Grace’s central wound, making the ensuing accident feel like the grim endpoint of a social truth.

She once explained her job as being “the organiser if Nike wanted to buy Adidas.”

The flippant gloss flaunts insider status while condensing complex legal power into an easy, brand-name metaphor. It’s charm as condescension: Caro centers herself as the orchestrator, the person who makes big things happen—implicitly placing Grace (and Jimmy) in supporting roles.