Opening
A psychologist corners Sadie Foust in a locked room and dismantles her sense of reality, while her husband Will Foust quietly perfects his alibi and his lies. Across five tense chapters, the truth snaps into focus: Sadie’s mind isn’t the only thing unreliable—her marriage is a weapon turned against her.
What Happens
Chapter 41: Sadie
In a windowless room, a psychologist claims she and Sadie have met before. Sadie remembers nothing after her interrogation with Officer Berg and bristles when the woman asks about her childhood and a woman named Camille. The psychologist proposes a diagnosis: Dissociative Identity Disorder and “alters” controlling Sadie at times. Sadie rejects it as a police ploy to pin Morgan Baines’s murder on her.
The psychologist presses on, saying she has already spoken to two alters—an aggressive woman, Camille, and a shy six-year-old—then produces a drawing of a dismembered body matching the ones found around the Foust home, allegedly drawn by the child alter. She mentions the “statue game,” which triggers a sharp memory of Tate chanting, “Statue game, statue game! Mommy is a liar!” The evidence rattles Sadie, cracking her certainty and pushing the theme of Unreliable Perception and Memory to the forefront.
The session turns devastating. DID often stems from childhood abuse, the psychologist explains, and Sadie’s blank years before age eleven fit. She shows documents that Sadie’s father remarried a woman named Charlotte Schneider when Sadie was six—another missing piece. Meanwhile, the police report Morgan’s phone was charging on the Fousts’ mantel, and the bloody knife and washcloth Sadie reported have vanished. The psychologist probes Sadie’s jealousy, citing Will’s statements. Sadie insists she didn’t hurt Morgan. “I don’t think Sadie did this,” the psychologist replies, as the room blurs and Sadie feels herself slipping away.
Chapter 42: Will
Will enters and instantly reads the woman in front of him as Sadie, not an alter—wrecked, tearful, malleable. Inside, he is all calculation, a master of Deception and Manipulation, even using menthol tissues to fake tears in the past. He prefers Camille’s volatility to Sadie’s softness and lies smoothly when Sadie questions his shifting alibi, pinning confusion on the police.
Then he tells the reader everything. Years ago, he murdered his ex-fiancée, Erin Sabine, after she tried to leave him, asphyxiating her and staging a car accident. Morgan, Erin’s younger sister, had been a child witness to their fight and recently threatened to expose him. Will also admits he exploited Sadie’s alters before—manipulating Camille into killing a student, Carrie Laemmer, who accused him of harassment. To him, Sadie’s DID is a tool, not a tragedy.
He comforts Sadie with a chilling pitch: he knows about her condition; it can be a “silver lining.” She can plead not guilty by reason of insanity—Camille did it, not Sadie. Her fear of being institutionalized means nothing to him. He leaves her with a mask of empathy and an inner void where remorse should be.
Chapter 43: Sadie
Officer Berg releases Sadie for lack of evidence: no knife, no bloody washcloth, and Morgan’s phone alone isn’t enough. Sadie refuses a ride and trudges home through snow in pajamas and slippers, the cold amplifying the chaos in her head.
On the walk, she replays the timeline. She left Otto Foust alone in the house when she went to the station. By the time police arrived, the evidence was gone—someone removed it. The house glows ahead, warm and ordinary, Will and Tate framed in a tableau of domestic peace that feels violently wrong.
Chapter 44: Will
At the door, Will folds Sadie into relief and rewrites the day in real time. He claims he left her at the station because they agreed he should check on the kids and shows call logs to numbers she won’t recognize—“colleagues” he supposedly asked to babysit. It’s calculated Gaslighting and Psychological Abuse, tailored to a woman whose memory he already knows how to bend.
Inside his head, he’s irritated he got sloppy: when Camille returned covered in blood, he rushed the cleanup and touched the knife and washcloth, forcing him to ditch them. He also admits another layer of control—Sadie’s medication is homemade cornstarch, placebo pills he crafts to keep her docile. When Sadie probes the timeline of the storm day, he stays vague, hearing danger in her questions.
Chapter 45: Sadie
In the bedroom, Otto startles Sadie. He looks sick and panicked; he couldn’t find her earlier and, instead, saw Will in the backyard “shoveling.” Sadie tries to rationalize it away—maybe Otto saw her going out for the dogs—but Otto insists: “It was Dad.” He saw Will out back before Tate got home, and Will wasn’t clearing a path—he was on the grass.
The horror lands all at once. Will wasn’t shoveling snow. He was digging. He buried the knife and the bloody washcloth. The final thought seals it:
The only way Will would know about that knife is if he was the one who put it there.
Character Development
The mask drops. Sadie’s fractured memory collides with external proof until denial no longer protects her, while Will steps forward in full as the novel’s true predator. Otto, quiet and ill, becomes the accidental witness whose simple observation detonates the façade.
- Sadie Foust: Moves from disbelief to dawning clarity, forced to reckon with a DID diagnosis, a missing childhood, and a husband exploiting both.
- Will Foust: Fully revealed as a calculating killer who weaponizes empathy, Sadie’s illness, and procedural gaps to control outcomes.
- Otto Foust: Vulnerable yet observant; his backyard sighting provides the critical link Sadie needs to see Will’s guilt.
Themes & Symbols
Deception and manipulation permeate every scene, culminating in Will’s confession. He constructs realities for different audiences—Sadie, the police, the reader—while keeping the true one private. Gaslighting and psychological abuse define his marriage strategy: rewrite conversations, produce misleading “proof,” and reinforce Sadie’s self-doubt to neutralize her.
Unreliable perception and memory deepen the dread. Sadie’s blackouts, the “statue game,” and the child alter’s drawings shift from puzzling artifacts to evidence of profound trauma. The gruesome drawings—once pinned on Otto—reveal themselves as the child alter’s voice, a symbol of buried violence emerging in the only way it can.
Key Quotes
“Statue game, statue game! Mommy is a liar! You do know what it is, you liar.”
This chant bridges Sadie’s conscious mind and her alter’s experience, corroborating the psychologist’s account. It turns a child’s rhyme into proof of dissociation and primes Sadie—and the reader—to question every memory.
“I don’t think Sadie did this.”
The psychologist separates Sadie from her alters, offering momentary relief that doubles as a chilling implication: someone wearing Sadie’s face may have done it. It reframes culpability and tightens the focus on identity.
The only way Will would know about that knife is if he was the one who put it there.
Sadie’s conclusion is the section’s pivot point. It collapses the mystery into a single, irrefutable logic chain and relocates the threat from inside her mind to the man beside her.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters flip the novel from mystery to psychological siege. Will’s private confession answers the whodunit but escalates the suspense: the reader now watches Sadie catch up while living under the predator’s roof. The stakes shift from solving Morgan’s death to surviving it—mind, body, and proof—and the story’s core clarifies: a woman fighting to reclaim reality from the person who profits most from breaking it.