Opening
Past and present collide as childhood terror, marital secrets, and an obsessive third party converge. A flashback plants the seed of coercive control, while in Maine, eerie discoveries and a stalking mistress tighten the noose around the Foust family. The result is a shift from mystery to full-throttle psychological danger.
What Happens
Chapter 21: Mouse
A young girl, “Mouse,” remembers the day her father brings home a new woman—“Fake Mom.” Mouse expects a puppy, not a pretty stranger with a dog crate and a dead-dog story. The house’s rhythm changes instantly: Mouse loses her place on the sofa, replaced by cuddling and “adult shows,” and learns to nod along when her father suggests she call the stranger “Mom.”
Mouse gets a guinea pig, Bert. When she corrects Fake Mom—Bert is a rodent, not a pig—her father beams, but Fake Mom doesn’t. Later, Fake Mom grips Mouse’s wrist and hisses that there’ll be “hell to pay” if Mouse makes her look stupid again. The mask slips only when Dad isn’t looking. Mouse withdraws, frightened and angry, imagining revenge even as she grasps the rules of Gaslighting and Psychological Abuse that now govern her home.
Chapter 22: Sadie
In the present, Sadie Foust finds a new padlock on Imogen’s bedroom door and a light burning in the forbidden attic where Will Foust’s sister, Alice, died by suicide. Inside, violent drawings show a hacked-apart body and a wild-eyed woman with a bloody knife. The expensive pencils belong to Otto Foust, but the crude style isn’t his. The attic dollhouse is disturbed: the father doll is missing; a tiny knife lies at the mother’s bed.
On the landing, Imogen denies she was in the attic, then weaponizes her trauma—describing her mother’s corpse in graphic detail—and shows Sadie a photo she took of the scene before police arrived. That night, Tate insists he saw Sadie watching him from the school fence, though she was at work. Will shrugs it off and blames Otto for the drawings, promising to call the school about bullying. Sadie suggests therapy for Imogen; Will calls Imogen’s confession “opening up.” The house hums with Trauma and Its Lasting Effects and Sadie’s Unreliable Perception and Memory, both of which make every creak feel like a threat.
Chapter 23: Camille
Camille narrates from Chicago: she is Will’s mistress and a watcher. She climbs fire escapes to spy on Will and Sadie, burns her palm to feel, and relives sex in Will’s empty classroom. She calls herself someone who eats his “table scraps” and still can’t stop.
In therapy, she hears that cheating men excel at Deception and Manipulation, that “I love you” can be entrapment when a man already has wife and lover. Camille twists this into comfort: if he won’t leave either, he also won’t leave her. Her narration exposes obsession masquerading as devotion—and an unreliable mind ready to rationalize anything.
Chapter 24: Sadie
Sadie wakes disoriented and naked, her nightgown on the floor. The true-crime book sits where Will left it, but the photograph of Erin Sabine, his high school girlfriend who died when her car slid into an icy pond, is missing. Sadie fixates on where he hid it.
She runs to clear her head and hears a voice riding the wind—“I hate you. You’re a loser. Die, die, die.”—then escapes a downpour into a café. Women gossip about Morgan Baines’s murder: five stab wounds from a narrow, curved boning knife; the killer took the weapon; it looks personal; someone who knew Morgan, and knew her husband was away.
Chapter 25: Camille
Camille follows Will to Maine and hides in a vacant house nearby. Nights, she watches the Foust home. One day, she slips inside while they’re out, eats their food, reads their paper, and answers the phone as Sadie to upgrade their cable.
Before leaving, she opens a gas valve and floods the kitchen with the sharp smell. She invades the bedroom—jewelry, makeup, a sweater—and lies in the bed, imagining Will beside her. Later, she tails him onto the ferry and into his campus building, waits for his class to end, and walks in. Will looks at her and smiles with relief: “I can’t believe you’re here.” The welcome cements her delusion and raises the stakes for the Fousts.
Character Development
The section deepens backstory and sharpens present danger, pushing characters toward confrontation and collapse.
- Sadie Foust: Anxiety spikes; lapses in memory, auditory episodes, and obsessive fixations erode her certainty. She starts actively investigating her world for threats.
- Will Foust: His past affair surfaces; he minimizes Sadie’s concerns and rationalizes Imogen’s behavior, widening the marital gap and clouding his judgment.
- Imogen: Traumatized, defensive, and strategic. She wields her mother’s death as a weapon and exerts control through shock and intimidation.
- Camille: Fully emerges as antagonist—relentless, calculating, and emboldened by any hint that Will still wants her.
- Mouse: Early exposure to coercion and fear shapes a worldview where love demands compliance and safety requires secrecy.
Themes & Symbols
The section braids deception with the lingering damage of trauma. Abuse hides in plain sight—from Fake Mom’s private threats to Camille’s impersonations—while the most dangerous manipulations often come with a smile. Trauma threads through Imogen’s cruelty and Sadie’s disorientation, blurring boundaries between perception and reality. As Sadie questions her senses, readers question the reliability of what we see and hear.
Symbols deepen the menace. The attic dollhouse mirrors the family’s fractured order: a missing father figure, a bedridden mother, and a knife at the threshold—home as crime scene in miniature. The vacant house becomes the stealth threat next door, danger embedded in domestic space. The missing photo of Erin isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a talisman of Will’s unspoken past and a trigger for Sadie’s spiraling doubt.
Key Quotes
“There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth, clamped between her teeth like this.”
Imogen turns her trauma into performance and punishment. The grotesque detail isn’t just memory; it’s control, meant to horrify Sadie and reassert power in a house where grief has no safe outlet.
“I can’t believe you’re here.”
Will’s relief when he sees Camille collapses the firewall between past affair and present family. For Camille, it’s proof of belonging; for the reader, it signals an escalation from covert stalking to sanctioned proximity.
“There’ll be hell to pay if you ever make me look stupid again.”
Fake Mom codifies the house’s new rules: knowledge is a liability, and truth-telling will be punished. The threat initiates Mouse into a world where survival demands silence and self-erasure.
“I hate you. You’re a loser. Die, die, die.”
Whether external or imagined, the voice reflects Sadie’s internalized hostility and fear. It reframes the island’s wind as a carrier of menace and underscores how vulnerable her perception has become.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters pivot the novel from puzzle to peril. Camille’s presence in Maine—and Will’s welcoming reaction—brings the external threat into the family’s core. The Mouse flashback roots present-day manipulation in a template of coercive control, while the attic’s drawings and dollhouse transform the Foust home into a stage for violence.
At the same time, details of Morgan Baines’s murder widen the community’s danger and triangulate with Sadie’s fragile perception. Past secrets (Will and Camille, Erin’s photo) converge with current menace (break-ins, gas valves, stalking), setting up the central conflict: can the Fousts recognize and confront the threat before it detonates from inside their own house?