Disclaimer

Catherine takes the day off to prepare an elaborate meal for herself and Robert. She thinks about Robert’s role as the mediator between her and Nicholas, who have always been argumentative. Catherine hopes that she and Nicholas will become closer now that he has moved out. She relishes the normal tasks of the day, like shopping, putting away groceries, and reading. She calls her mother to chat, tiptoeing around her mother’s declining memory. Catherine starts cooking, but Robert doesn’t arrive as planned. Hours later, he texts that he is stuck at work.

Before Robert leaves work, he opens Stephen’s package: photos of Catherine and a copy of The Perfect Stranger. The images show Catherine and Nicholas on the beach, and some show Catherine in sexually explicit poses in a hotel room. Robert is shocked by Catherine’s betrayal and angry that Nicholas may have witnessed his mother’s affair. Nicholas didn’t say anything when they returned, but Robert now thinks his son was hiding something. He remembers Catherine wanting to go back to work after returning from Spain, and he now suspects it was because she was depressed about their marriage. Robert makes connections between this revelation and Catherine’s recent behavior, seeing her anxiety and sleeplessness as symptoms of guilt.

Robert ignores Catherine’s texts, and calls Nicholas to go out for dinner. He arrives at Nicholas’s flat and waits. Robert blames Catherine for pushing Nicholas to move out into a dirty apartment that smells like marijuana. Robert and Nicholas eat at a pub. Robert asks Nicholas about his job and roommates. Nicholas reveals he has a girlfriend, and they are planning to go on vacation, which Robert offers to pay for. Robert opportunistically asks Nicholas about the Spain vacation, but Nicholas remembers nothing. Robert waits until late to return home. Instead of reading the book, he looks it up online. He sneaks into the house and sleeps in the spare room.

Catherine goes to bed alone for the second night in a row and tries to rationalize Robert’s evasions. She hears a car door slam, so she goes downstairs. Robert coldly confronts Catherine with the photos, forcing her to look at each one. As Catherine is lost in painful memories, Robert takes her silence as an admission of guilt. Catherine tries to explain herself, but Robert refuses to listen. He shouts over her, accusing her of endangering their son so she could have sex with a stranger. Catherine tells Robert that the photos and book don’t show the truth, but struggles to describe what really happened. Exasperated by Robert’s false accusations, Catherine yells that the person who took the photos—Stephen’s son Jonathan—is dead.

Stephen recounts the day in 1993 that he and Nancy learned about Jonathan’s death. The police told Stephen and Nancy that Jonathan drowned accidentally in Spain. Stephen and Nancy had to go to Spain to identify the body, since authorities wouldn’t release it otherwise. The police left, and Stephen and Nancy sat together in shock. Nancy immediately started packing, and later got more information about the accident, including Catherine’s connection, by calling the consulate. Stephen remembers their decision not to contact Catherine; Nancy went behind his back to meet Catherine after developing Jonathan’s film.

After the fight, Robert leaves the house with a bottle of whiskey to sleep in his car. Catherine runs outside but doesn’t follow him down the street. In the car, Robert gets drunk and thinks about Catherine’s deception. In the early hours of the morning, he takes the bus into town so he can read The Perfect Stranger before work. He sees two others on the bus and imagines what circumstances brought them out at that hour. At a café, Robert orders breakfast and opens the book. He decides that the book must be the definitive version of events, since Catherine was so persistent that it was false.

Robert starts from the beginning, which opens with a young couple, John and Sarah, travelling to Nice. Sarah returns home to her family, but she encourages John to continue his dream vacation. Robert reads the looming tragedy behind the optimistic atmosphere.

When Stephen and Nancy went to Spain to identify Jonathan’s body, he looked through Jonathan’s postcards before leaving. In Spain, the couple cried when they saw Jonathan’s embalmed body. Stephen noticed self-inflicted cuts on Jonathan’s arm, and Nancy kissed her son’s hand. The couple then visited the last two places Jonathan went: the beach and his hotel. At the beach, they walked into the water and silently said goodbye to their son. At the hotel, Nancy packed up Jonathan’s clothes while Stephen stared distractedly out the window. Stephen believes Nancy hid Jonathan’s camera in this moment. Nancy looked at Jonathan’s personal items, like his Swiss Army knife, his aftershave, and cigarettes he’d kept secret from his parents. Stephen remembers Jonathan’s girlfriend at the time, Sarah, who left the trip early. Stephen thought the pair were a bad match, but he wonders if Jonathan would still be alive if she had stayed.

Robert pushes his morning meeting back so he can continue reading The Perfect Stranger. The book describes John’s (Jonathan) first meeting with Charlotte (Catherine). Charlotte, a bored mother looking for excitement while her husband is away, chooses the naïve John as her target. Charlotte projects the appearance of being an attentive mother, but the book suggests this is an act to ensnare John. John sees Charlotte scantily clad and falls for her performance. Robert recognizes the scene from one of the photographs.

The book imagines that John helps Charlotte calm her unruly son, and as a thank-you, Charlotte buys him a beer. Charlotte brings John up to her hotel room, where her son sleeps in the adjoining room. John undresses Charlotte and takes pictures of her. The book’s narrator describes Charlotte’s affinity for secrecy, and Robert reads hate and jealousy in the description.

Back on the night of the fight, Catherine follows Robert’s car into the road and waits for him to come back. She worries that Robert is reading the book and misunderstanding the story. Catherine regrets not telling Robert the truth, but she is grateful to be unburdened about Jonathan’s death. She drinks several cups of tea and goes to sleep, welcoming the numbness produced by the confrontation. Catherine wakes up to a phone call from an unknown number, and she knows Stephen is on the other end.

Chapter 29 is an excerpt from The Perfect Stranger. 

Charlotte and her son Noah (Nicholas) are at the beach the day after Charlotte’s sexual encounter with John. Charlotte is careless with her attention toward Noah. She tries to lie down, but Noah’s noisy playing annoys her. She takes Noah for ice cream, and on the way, she passes John, but they pretend not to know each other. John sets his towel down away from Charlotte’s, but close enough so they can see each other.

Charlotte and Noah return to the beach. Noah now has an inflatable dinghy to keep him occupied. Charlotte and John sneak desirous glances at one another. Charlotte asks a woman to watch Noah while she steps away, and John follows her to the bathroom. John and Charlotte have sex in a bathroom cubicle, staying quiet so other occupants don’t hear them. On the way back, Charlotte stops at the public showers, and John dives into the ocean. Both return to their respective towels and doze off.

The weather changes, and the rough ocean drags Noah’s dinghy further from shore. Charlotte wakes up and freezes in place. She calls out to John for help. John swims out to Noah, grabs onto the dinghy, and swims toward shore, struggling against the ocean’s current. Two men swim out to help, and they successfully bring Noah to safety. John gets caught in the water and gets pulled further away. He clamors to stay above surface, but he drowns before a boat can reach him. The boat brings John’s body to shore where the men unsuccessfully administer CPR. The crowd shields Charlotte and Noah from seeing John’s dead body.

After reading the book, Robert attends a meeting at his office, but he is lost in thought. He tries to remind himself that the book is subjective, but he fears the story is true. Robert thinks about the book’s depiction of Catherine as someone who always gets what she wants, and he recalls times in their life where that was true. He wonders if Catherine’s aloofness from Nicholas is because he reminds her of her dead lover. Robert’s thoughts spiral as he considers Catherine comparing him to the other man. The end of the meeting snaps Robert out of his thoughts. He plans to contact Jonathan’s family, and he invites Nicholas out for dinner again.