Opening
On a small island cut off after dusk, Sadie Foust and her husband, Will Foust, face a murder next door and a marriage riddled with secrets. As police circle and alibis wobble, the dead neighbor, Morgan Baines, becomes the center of a tightening web—while an obsessive other woman and a child’s eerie voice tilt the story into psychological free fall.
What Happens
Chapter 6: Sadie
Sadie comes home to Officer Berg questioning Will about Morgan’s murder. Shock collides with old wounds: Sadie relives Will’s infidelity and the trust that never fully returns, setting the tone for the couple’s pattern of Deception and Manipulation. Berg notes that Morgan’s six-year-old daughter finds the body, a detail that turns Sadie’s fear visceral.
Will and Sadie offer an alibi—TV, then bed. Pressed for anything unusual, Will mentions coming home recently to an open garage door and a house thick with gas from the stove. He blames himself, but the story suggests someone is tampering with their home. Berg adds a chilling constraint: the last ferry leaves at 8:30 PM, so the killer is still on the island. Before he goes, he mentions Alice, the previous owner, saying he never would have pegged her for the suicide type—another crack in the house’s history that keeps widening.
Chapter 7: Camille
In a flashback, Camille narrates how she seeks out Will fifteen years after he “saves” her. She frames Sadie as the thief who steals what is hers, then methodically seduces Will—touch, praise, proximity—cultivating his dissatisfaction into an escape route. In a cheap hotel room he calls the encounter “perfect” and her “amazing,” and Camille hears not weakness but permission.
Her voice is predatory and controlled. She promises Will, “You’re stuck with me,” and claims she will never let him go—staking a claim that refuses to fade, even after Sadie uncovers the affair. The flashback reframes Will’s marriage and plants Camille as a threat still orbiting the Fousts’ lives.
Chapter 8: Sadie
Sleepless, Sadie checks on the children—Otto Foust, Tate, and her stepdaughter Imogen, whose door is locked from the inside. Downstairs, a bookmark drops from Will’s true-crime book, and with it a hidden photo of Erin Sabine, his gorgeous, deceased fiancée. The discovery reignites everything Sadie fears: that she is a consolation prize, that Will’s heart lives elsewhere. Past wounds flood the present, underscoring Trauma and Its Lasting Effects.
The dogs explode into barking outside. Sadie lets them out and feels watched, a primal terror that sends her bolting back in. Will talks her down—probably a coyote or raccoon—sounding sensible while making her question her instincts, a dynamic that echoes Gaslighting and Psychological Abuse. As she heads to bed, Imogen’s once-locked door now sits ajar, her window open to the night.
Chapter 9: Sadie
After a hollow night, Sadie ferries Otto to the dock. Berg approaches and slides into her car: he has interviewed the neighbors. He challenges her claim she never meets Morgan and plays a recording from Mr. Nilsson describing a vicious argument between Sadie and Morgan just last week, culminating in hair ripped from scalp. Sadie has no memory of it. Her credibility collapses in real time, and Unreliable Perception and Memory becomes the lens through which every detail blurs.
Now a prime suspect to the reader and the police, Sadie must confront a possibility more terrifying than a killer on the island: that her own memory might be lying to her.
Chapter 10: Mouse
A new voice arrives: a six-year-old nicknamed Mouse. She loves pretend games, her stuffed bear, and the lava the floor becomes. Her tone is light and sing-song, her world small and safe—until it isn’t. In the final beat, she reveals that her special name curdles when someone new enters her world: “Fake Mom.” One line turns the chapter cold, implying Mouse is Morgan’s stepdaughter and that home life, even before the murder, is a site of fracture and fear.
Character Development
In these chapters, relationships buckle under secrets while the narrative starts to doubt itself. The island’s isolation turns suspicion inward, exposing fractures in the Foust family and beyond.
- Sadie: Anxiety spikes into paranoia; the Erin photo shreds her sense of worth; Berg’s recording destabilizes her memory and reliability.
- Will: Appears soothing and rational, but his past affair, the hidden photo, and the gas-leak incident cloud him in secrecy and control.
- Camille: Claims ownership of Will; manipulative, persistent, and emboldened by his response, she reads desire as permission and permanence.
- Imogen: Keeps to a locked room; the sudden open door and window suggest secrets and surveillance—or a plea for someone to notice.
- Mouse: A tender, innocent narrator whose final line refracts the adult plot through a child’s dread.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters knit private wounds to public danger. Deceit corrodes the Foust marriage while the police investigation presses on, making every domestic detail double as a possible crime scene. The house—open garage, gas-filled kitchen, unlocked doors—becomes a stage for intrusion, where danger might be outside or already living within.
Memory itself becomes a battleground. If Sadie can’t trust what she remembers, the reader can’t either. That uncertainty shifts the mystery from Whodunit? to What is the truth? The hidden photo of Erin functions as a talisman of unresolved grief and competing loves, a symbol of how the past keeps breaching the present and how a marriage can become a museum of old ghosts.
Key Quotes
“You’re stuck with me, Will. I won’t ever let you go.”
- Camille translates desire into possession, revealing her fixation and long-game strategy. The line foreshadows her ongoing threat to the Fousts’ life.
He “never would have pegged her for the suicide type.”
- Berg’s comment about the previous owner, Alice, seeds suspicion that the house carries a darker history. It broadens the mystery beyond a single crime scene.
The “new doctor lady” screaming and grabbing “a handful of Ms. Morgan’s hair right out of her head.”
- The Nilsson recording recasts Sadie as violent and untrustworthy. It’s the moment the narrative turns on memory, making Sadie—and the reader—doubt what’s real.
“Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.”
- A single sentence collapses childhood comfort into menace. It reframes Morgan as complicated within her own home and deepens the emotional stakes of the murder.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 6–10 shift the book from a neighborhood murder to a claustrophobic psychological thriller. The island traps suspects together; Camille’s possessive flashback complicates Will; the Erin photo and Berg’s recording dismantle Sadie’s reliability; Mouse’s voice injects dread from a child’s vantage point. Together, these threads argue that the central mystery isn’t only who kills Morgan—it’s whether anyone’s version of events can be trusted and how past wounds script the present danger.