The Turn of The Key

“I felt, in some twisted way, like I was coming home.”

On the approach to Carn Bridge, Rowan starts to feel calm—as well as oddly hopeful. She does not consider herself to be an ambitious person, but she senses that the unprecedented effort she’s put into this job may actually pay off. Although she doesn’t have the job yet, Heatherbrae House already feels like home. However, her sense of security will turn out to be a false one and shows Rowan’s innocence and naivete.

“More than that, I wanted to be part of this family.”

When Rowan sees her bedroom at Heatherbrae House, she is overwhelmed by her desire to have the job. She knows it’s not about the money or the house, which she finds beautiful and warm, but the family. Without having met anyone besides Sandra, she is drawn to the Elincourts and wants to be a part of their world. She will stop at nothing to win them over. 

“The two taken together, the eerie little drawing and the unfinished note, gave me a strange feeling that I could not put my finger on. Something like uneasiness, though I could not have said why.”

After finding the house’s voice command system creepy, Rowan encounters another feeling of unease about the house when she finds the child’s drawing with Katya’s unfinished note on the reverse side. However, she doesn’t understand yet why she feels that way and is able to brush the sensation aside. The moment foreshadows the events that are soon to transpire and suggests that the wealth, luxury, and comfort of Heatherbrae House mask something sinister.

“Something inside me seemed to twist and break, just a little, and suddenly I was not sure if I should have come here after all. But I knew one thing. I could not go back. Not now.”

As she’s getting a tour of the house from Sandra, Rowan experiences a moment of intense doubt about taking the job. She’s seen aspects of life at Heatherbrae that have given her pause, including the intrusive surveillance system, the strange note in her room, and the odd décor—with its contrast of modern and Victorian, which she finds jarring. However, she knows she’s invested too much and come too far to reverse course. She’s committed, even if it makes her uneasy.

“I look back, and I want to shake that smug young woman, sitting in her London flat, thinking she knew it all, had seen it all.”

Upon accepting the job at Heatherbrae, Rowan is undeterred by the supposed supernatural activity there. However, she looks back at this naïve version of herself with frustration and alarm. She recognizes her arrogance and stupidity. She wishes she’d taken the prospect of the house being haunted more seriously.

“Only that sounds as if I’m building something—a house perhaps. Or a picture in a jigsaw. Piece by piece. And the truth is, it was the other way around. Piece by piece, I was being torn apart.”

Rowan knows her letter to Mr. Wrexham is taking a long time to build up to the point, but she insists it’s the only way he will understand what happened. It’s the most adequate way to convey the extent to which she began unraveling and slowly coming apart. Rowan is already having a difficult time managing the situation on her first day, demonstrating the extent to which she is unprepared for the challenges that lie ahead.

“The idea of starting all this all over again at 6:00 am was giving me a kind of sick feeling. How had I ever thought I could do this?”

Rowan’s difficult first day with the children makes her question why she took the job. She went into the situation with excitement and confidence but quickly learned that she is not up to it. She masks her anxieties when recapping the day with Sandra, but feels sick at the thought of another day like the one she just had.

“‘See you in an hour or so?’ he said, but this time, when he smiled, it no longer made my heart leap a little. Instead, I noticed the tendons on the back of his hands, the way he kept the dogs’ leashes very short, pulled in against his heel, dominating them.”

Jack’s charm quickly wears off when Rowan decides he may have been the one to hide the key to the back door. Until that point, she found him to be a nice person, but now she wonders if it’s an act. Her growing suspicion toward Jack is only one of the ways Rowan’s view of her job is rapidly changing. She is coming to regard everyone around her with suspicion and mistrust.

“When she looked at me, with that touch of triumph in her dark, boot-button eyes, I had recognized something else too, and now I knew what it was. It was a flash of myself in those eyes. A flicker of my own dark brown eyes, and my own determination. Maddie was a woman with a plan, just like I was. The question was, what was it?

Rowan sees a reflection of herself in Maddie. They carry the same dark mix of anger, sadness, and determination that shines in their eyes. Rowan’s pain primarily stems from her feelings towards her mother, who never received her love or made her feel loved in return. Now that she recognizes those same feelings in Maddie, she can begin to figure out where they come from and what her ultimate game Is.

“It wasn’t as physical as the work at the nursery, or as intense, but it was the way it stretched, endlessly, the way the needing never stopped, and there was never a moment when you could hand them over to your colleague and run away for a quick fag break to just be yourself.”

Rowan realizes that the demands of her job are relentless. She was not prepared for how different it would be from her previous work at the nursery school, where other people were around to help her if she needed a break. The physical isolation of the house places a tremendous burden on her to provide the children with her full attention at all times. Rowan feels the stress after only a couple of days, again demonstrating how naïve she had been going into the job.

“I stood on my tiptoes, and pulling his shoulder down towards me, I kissed his cheek. I felt the leanness of his skin, the roughness of a day-old beard beneath my lips, and the warmth of him. And I felt something at the core of me clench with wanting.”

Although she’s only been at Heatherbrae for a couple of days, Rowan finds herself becoming closer to Jack. Despite her suspicions about him, she also feels a strong attraction toward him. As the situation in the house spirals out of control, she allows herself to be vulnerable with him. She is not close with many people, so opening up to Jack is an unusual—and seemingly uncharacteristic—step for her to take.

“My whole body was shuddering with adrenaline, and I knew how close I had come to really letting go—slapping the smirk off her knowing little face. If she had been my own child I would have done it, no questions. My rage had been white-hot and absolute.”

Maddie almost succeeds in provoking a violent reaction out of Rowan, but Rowan catches herself and walks away from the situation. The quote demonstrates that Maddie has successfully found ways to push Rowan near her breaking point and seems determined to continue her campaign of vengeance. However, Rowan is managing to tame her rage and not engage with Maddie when she acts out.

“I wanted, more than anything, to open the door, tiptoe in, and cuddle Maddie and Ellie, kiss their hot little foreheads, tell them how lucky they were to have a mother who at least wanted to be there, even if she couldn’t.”

Rowan envies Maddie and Ellie’s loving relationship with Sandra because it is something she never had growing up. Her mother was often cold and distant with her, and their dysfunctional dynamic continues to haunt her as an adult. A strong mother/daughter bond is something Rowan is missing from her life and greatly desires. It is possibly one of the reasons she was driven to work in child care, although she never explicitly makes the connection.

“And yet, as the footsteps passed above me again, slow and relentless, I felt a kind of panic rise up inside me, possessing me, and I could not stop my eyes turning towards the locked door, imagining it opening, the slow tread, tread of old feet on the stairs inside, and then the at cadaverous, hollow face coming towards me in the darkness, the bony arm outstretched.”

After being awakened in the night again—this time by the doorbell—Rowan begins to yield to her fears. She struggles to maintain her sanity amidst her strange experiences in the house—and a lack of proper sleep. The quote shows that her grip on reality is slipping as she’s starting to experience hallucinations of what she believes to be the ghost of Dr. Grant and has convinced herself that the sounds she hears above her are his relentless pacing.

“Paranoid thoughts flitted through my mind—had she seen the camera footage of me almost hitting Maddie, or the endless stream of treats I had been bribing the girls with? Or was it something…else? Something Jean McKenzie had said?”

Receiving an unexpected email from Sandra floods Rowan’s mind with anxiety. The fact that Rowan immediately assumes the email carries an indictment of her behavior demonstrates how toxic and stressful her job has become. She knows her actions haven’t been impeccable and constantly worries the Elincourts are watching and judging her via the house’s numerous cameras.

“I felt like it should be me asking the questions, grilling her. Why did I always seem to be on the wrong end of a power struggle? But it was a perfectly reasonable question, so I tried to keep my voice even as I answered it.”

When Rowan finally meets Rhiannon, she realizes their dynamic is not unfamiliar. She finds herself being intimidated by yet another one of the Elincourt children, adding additional stress to her situation at Heatherbrae. While she is able to maintain her composure, Rowan has to fight against her instinct to react in a more hostile or aggressive manner.

“It was only a few days since I’d turned up—note-perfect in my rendition of Rowan the Perfect Nanny, in her tweed skirt and neatly buttoned cardigan. I looked far from perfect now. I was wearing crumpled jeans, and my sweatshirt was stained with Petra’s breakfast. I looked much closer to the person I really was, as if the real me was leaking out of the cracks in the façade, taking over.”

Rowan’s experiences at Heatherbrae have had the effect of wearing down her carefully crafted image of the perfect nanny. She is having an increasingly difficult time maintaining her composure amidst sleepless nights and unmanageable children. Her real character, which is rougher around the edges, is beginning to emerge. She is losing control of her public persona and yielding to her inner self.

“Whatever the truth of this attic, Jack was not my white knight. And I was not some terrified child who needed protecting from the reality of what lay behind this locked door.”

Despite her fears of the attic, Rowan knows she needs to find courage. She does not want to present herself as helpless, vulnerable, and afraid. She especially doesn’t want to place Jack in the role of her rescuer because it will cast her as someone weak. Once she is characterized that way, she fears she may never be able to escape it.

“The feeling that washed over me was—it was like someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head and shoulders, a drenching, paralyzing deluge of pure fear that left me unable to do anything but stand there, shaking and gasping and shivering.”

The supernatural events transpiring at Heatherbrae have left Rowan feeling increasingly compromised by her fear. When she wakes up to the doll’s head on her lap, she feels panic on a level that she has yet to experience. Her anxiety makes it difficult for her to function in those moments.

“All I had focused on was getting that interview, standing in Heatherbrae House, looking Sandra and Bill in the eye. That was all I had wanted. The only reason I had answered the ad. And yet somehow, the opportunities had kept presenting themselves, like temptingly wrapped gifts on a plate, begging me to pick them up and make them mine.”

When Rowan’s identity as Rachel Gerhardt is exposed, aspects of her real personality are also revealed. As evidenced by the quote, she shows that she is willing to deceive others and skirt the law to get what she wants. She is also unconcerned with the consequences of her actions or the long-term implications of assuming someone else’s identity. She justifies her actions by claiming that she couldn’t help herself. Her ability to manipulate and deceive others through a false identity makes it impossible for the police to believe her innocence in the murder case.

“I had a past. Maybe Jack did too. And God only knew, I had too many secrets of my own to hold someone else’s up to the light to condemn them.”

After Rachel and Jack sleep together, Rachel thinks she hears him mumble someone else’s name when he sleepily says goodbye. However, she feels she has no right to judge him because she is operating under a false identity. As the quote reveals, there are other unrevealed secrets that she’s keeping that could further call her character into question.

“There was a biting retort on the tip of my tongue, but somehow, as she stood there, the kitchen spotlights making her tousled, tangled blond hair glow like fire, with her face twisted into a grimace of rage and pain, she looked so like Maddie, so like me, that my heart gave a little skip.”

As Rachel sees herself in Maddie, she also sees herself in Rhiannon. The pain and rage in Rhiannon’s face are familiar, and they bring Rachel to a place of sympathy rather than anger. Since she reveals at the end of the chapter that Bill is also her father, the image she sees of herself in both Maddie and Rhiannon is more than just a reflection of shared emotional states. They are her half-sisters, and Rachel feels a strong connection to them despite her efforts to maintain her distance.

“I didn’t expect to get the job. I didn’t even want it. I just wanted to meet the man who had abandoned me all those years before. But when I saw Heatherbrae, I knew, Mr. Wrexham. I knew that one visit was never going to be enough for me. I wanted to be a part of all this, to sleep in the softness of those feather beds, to sink into the velvet sofas, to bask under the rainwater showers—to be a part of this family, in short.”

Rachel’s motives for wanting to stay at Heatherbrae become clear after she confesses to Mr. Wrexham that she is Bill’s daughter. Although her main motive when assuming a false identity and applying for the job was to meet Bill, she immediately felt a strong connection to the house and family upon arriving at Heatherbrae. She wanted to get to know her half-sisters and experience being a part of a loving family—something she never had growing up. She craved the luxury and comfort of the house, as well as the sense of belonging it seemed to offer.