Behind Her Eyes

At the end of that day, Louise is happy and tired after a day playing with Adam: “My real life feels good” (238). However, she finds her keys to the clinic in her bag which brings up thoughts of Adele and David. She realizes she can get into the clinic to look for David’s file on Adele.

Later that evening, she does this, and has to break into his locked drawer to find it, hidden under bottles of brandy and mints. She reads the file, which goes back 10 years. David’s brief notes describe Adele’s minor breakdown after Westlands, an abortion, her paranoia, jealousy, and psychosis, and refer to situations with women called Julia and Marianne, which caused the couple to move, “[a]gain” (245). Louise reflects on how awful it would be if Adele knew that Louise had betrayed her. She continues to read. David refers to Adele killing the cat in a rage and asks himself if there have really been any coincidences and accidents, as Adele claims. The final words Louise reads are: “Louise. What to do about her?” (245).

After leaving Westlands, Adele is at Fairdale House—her family home—waiting for David to arrive. She is feeling calm and looks at photographs of when her parents were alive. When David arrives, they are awkward at first: “[T]he month apart, and the fire, sit between them” (248), but soon they relax, laugh, and talk about marriage. They walk to the disused well in the grounds, and she tells him how she used to imagine crying all her sadness into it and sealing it up. David comforts her, and she thinks that one day she might “explain about the night of the fire. Maybe” (251). They eat, drink, and make love. They talk about “new beginnings” before she goes to sleep intending to dream of their perfect future together.

While she waits for Adele to text her back about the file she found, Louise receives a visit from her friend Sophie. When Louise confesses what has been happening with her and the couple, Sophie recriminates her and questions Adele’s sanity. Louise defends Adele and remains resolute in her belief that Adele is “sweet and fragile” (254).

Later, David appears at her door and tells her he knows she broke into his office, because there is a security camera; he demands the keys. Aggressively, he warns her to “stay away from us. If you don’t want to end up hurt” (256). He tells Louise to stay out of his marriage. Then he asks how she and Adele met and when she explains in detail, he tells her Adele has never walked him to work, as she claimed to Louise on the day they literally bumped into one another. Louise believes he is lying and that she should not trust him, but also vows to herself to leave the couple alone. Stressed and anxious, she tries to relax, and finds herself looking down at herself on the sofa, having passed through the second door. When she comes back to herself, she wonders what happened.

That night, Adele is dressed up with a nice meal ready for David when he gets home, drunk. She tells him she wants to be with him, but he replies that he wants a divorce: “I want this over. All of it” (262). She thinks that “the past needs digging up and laying to rest properly. The past. The body” (262). David tells her he knows she knew all along who Louise was. He asks how she always knows things. She feigns innocence and he storms off to bed. Adele knows he has warned Louise which reflects that he really loves Adele. She imagines killing him but realizes she could never do that. She thinks about how much she loves Louise for whom she is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, of which tomorrow will be one.

The next day, Louise goes to Adele’s house to tell her about the file. When Adele doesn’t answer the door, Louise sees her slumped in a chair, and frets that David has made her take an overdose of pills. She remembers Adele told her where to find the door keys, so she enters, and finds Adele cold and unresponsive at first, but she wakes up. Louise tells her about the file and her suspicion that David just wanted Adele’s money. Adele explains that the file is David’s insurance against her revealing what happened to Rob. She shows Louise the tree painting in the bedroom and then tells Louise she thinks David killed Rob. Adele describes the weekend Rob visited Fairdale while David was there, and how David was jealous of him. She says Rob wanted her to leave them alone together. The next day Rob was gone, but Adele couldn’t believe he would leave without saying goodbye; he also left his drugs behind. They never discussed it, but from then on David never wanted to sell the estate. They got married and she got pregnant, but David made her have an abortion. They moved to England. Louise is shocked by the story and the idea that David is a killer. Adele confirms that she thinks Rob’s body is in the grounds of her parents’ house.

Louise stays with Adele, wanting to know more. Adele knows Louise is shaken, confused, and full of pity for Adele. Adele thinks about how she will make sure Louise gets to the truth, and then takes the truth to David, so he can be unburdened: “And then let it unravel them” (274).

Louise reads Rob’s entry in the notebook about going to stay at Fairdale. He is excited and happy, and planning to steal his sister’s unemployment benefit money to pay for the journey. The next pages are torn out. The entry stimulates even more questions in Louise’s mind. She looks up Robert Dominic Hoyle on the internet but doesn’t find him. However, she finds his sister and calls her, pretending to be a journalist enquiring about Westlands’s effectiveness. Rob’s sister tells Louise that on return from the residence, Rob took heroin again, stole her money, and disappeared. She thinks he may be dead, and she doesn’t care. Louise realizes she is trying to piece together a murder investigation.

After putting her reluctant son to bed, Louise researches Adele’s parents and the fire. She finds pictures, articles proclaiming David the hero who saved Adele from the fire, and then the line: suspicion of arson. She wonders if David committed this crime. She finds the name Detective Inspector Angus Wignall, who was investigating the case at the time. She vows to write him an anonymous letter implicating David. She is doing this for Rob. Then she says she will be done.

Rob is at Fairdale and he and Adele are happy, relaxed and very close, although not sexual. He has brought heroin and marijuana and they smoke the latter together. Adele tells Rob she is rich, will help him, and loves him. He says he loves her too.

Two days later, Adele is lying low at home, waiting for “[t]he moment when I can turn everything on its head. I can’t miss it” (293). She knows David has not been to see Louise, and that Louise has sent the letter even though Louise has not told Adele about the letter. Adele reflects that everyone is full of secrets, if closely examined. Although she is glad Louise is doing everything she wants, Adele says her own feelings don’t matter anymore: “I’m going to be dead soon” (295).

Nervous and stressed about having sent the letter, Louise lies down for a nap at home. She finds herself going through the second door and having an out-of-body experience where she can move through her flat, to her neighbor’s flat, and then toward David and Adele’s house. She feels liberated: “I’m simply me, whatever that is” (301). However, she is pulled back, as if by an elastic band, to her own house. A frantic Adam wakes her and she jolts upright, just like Adele did when Louise found her in the same state. Adele calls Louise at that moment and brusquely tells her to forget what she had said during their previous meeting. Louise realizes that Adele has lied about never seeing the second door.

In this four-line chapter, Adele says true love sometimes needs a helping hand, and that she has “always been good at providing that” (307).

Now more distrustful of Adele and wondering if Sophie was right to question her sanity, Louise sets out to try and find Marianne (one of the names she saw in the file at David’s office). When she does, the two talk and Marianne describes her situation with the couple. She had become a platonic friend and confidante to David; he told her he had done something terrible in the past, which his increasingly unstable wife was threatening to reveal if he left her. Adele warned Marianne to stay out of their life. However, David said he had not told Adele about their conversations. Adele killed Marianne’s cat in front of her. When Marianne told David this, he was upset but not shocked; in fact, he seemed almost relieved. He persuaded Marianne not to press charges and later he wrote and told her they had moved away. Marianne warns Louise to keep away from the couple, who she calls “damaged goods” (318).

Louise realizes Adele has been lying to her and that David had warned her out of fear, not aggression. She decides to trust him. She calls the clinic and asks for him, pretending to be Marianne.

The scene returns to Fairdale and David arrives at the house where Adele and Rob have been waiting for him, cooking a roast dinner. Rob is nervous and Adele excited. Rob has hidden all his drug paraphernalia. Adele introduces them, the three have dinner together, and Rob behaves with polite interest toward David. The next morning the two men are more relaxed and joke together. After a walk in the woods past the old well, the three have dinner and wine, and Rob suggests Adele go to bed and let them have some man time together. Adele tells Rob not to mention her money to David, as he might not like it, and Rob tells her it “hadn’t crossed [his] mind” (325).

At Louise’s request, she and David meet. David has clearly been drinking and is tired. Louise tells him she has spoken to Marianne; she also tells him she has done a very bad thing and persuades him to listen to what she has to say. She says she understands why he warned her away. She knows Adele is crazy and has a hold over him. She believes that Adele, not David, killed Rob. She is sorry for believing Adele and not trusting David but she realizes her mistake and wants to hear everything he has to say.

David says he once loved Adele very much, starting from when she was a young girl on the farm who told him about her nightmares. Her parents didn’t approve of him—the alcoholic’s son. David and Adele fell in love, and he saved her from the fire at Fairdale that killed her parents. He was suspected of arson at the time. Adele met Rob at Westlands and though David didn’t like the ex-junkie, he knew Rob was good for Adele. They met only for one weekend at Fairdale. Ten days later, Rob was dead. Adele told David that Rob died of an overdose while they were taking drugs together and in her panic and shame she pushed him down the disused well. David agreed not to reveal her secret.

They got married and Adele got pregnant but wanted an abortion “to get this alien thing out of her” (333). She started to spend huge amounts of her inheritance and agreed to put David in charge of it to help control her spending problem. They carried on in this way for four years but with Adele’s changed personality and David’s guilt about Rob, he asked for a divorce. At that, Adele threatened to take all the money, about which David didn’t care. Adele threatened to tell the police about Rob, which would implicate David because when she put Rob’s body in the well, Adele was wearing David’s watch, which was now in the well with Rob’s body. David’s fear then kept them together, but her increasingly unstable behavior—including several incidences of violent and dangerous jealous reactions to any women that David knew—meant they had to relocate every time it happened. Adele’s obsessive love for David, coupled with her claims that she could travel where she wanted while sleeping, were signs of serious mental illness. David says that is why he was so glad to meet Louise, who is so normal and sane.

Louise tells David she believes everything he told her. She tells him about the letter she has sent to the police. David decides to go and speak to Agnus Wignall in Scotland and tell him everything. If they don’t believe him, he would rather go to prison than continue living trapped with the lie. Louise asks him to spend a little time with her first. He refuses but says it is enough for him that Louise believes him. Louise reflects that she still has one secret: the dreaming and the doors. David warns Louise away from Adele again, but she plans to try and get the truth out of Adele in order to save David from prison.

Louise calls Adele and tells her that she knows Adele is guilty, that she has sent the letter, that David has gone to the police, and that Adele has lost him. She asks Adele why she told her about the lucid dreaming and the doors. Adele emotionally feigns innocence and love for Louise and claims that she believes David won’t leave her. Louise says Adele should tell the police the truth to save David and to prove her love for him.

After the phone call, Louise worries that Adele may do something crazy to Adam, so she asks Ian, his dad, to take him for the night. Ian happily agrees.

That evening, Adele is at home alone, thinking about time passing and that this is her last day. She knows Adam is with his father. Everything is ready. She prepares her bed, writes a letter for David, puts on her pajamas, and waits for 10:30.

At the same time, Louise speaks to David in Scotland and thinks about how much she loves him. She receives a text message from Adele, which says Louise is right that Adele should make things better. But Louise thinks Adele is going to kill herself: “Maybe he’ll be happy now with me gone. I was your friend Louise, for a little while. Please remember that” (357). Louise rushes in a taxi to Adele’s house, but getting no response at the door, opens the letterbox and smells smoke. Unable to find the key, she realizes she can summon the second door and enter the house that way. She does and finds Adele on the bed, looking dead. Louise decides that to save her, she should enter Adele’s body and run out of the burning house. As she enters Adele’s body, she realizes something is terribly wrong.

Louise and David are talking to the police after the fire. They are now a couple, openly in love. The police inspector tells them Adele started the fire and took a heroin overdose. David works out that she obtained the drug from Anthony Hawkins. Her letter to David confessed everything.

The first-person narrator in this chapter is Adele, inside Louise’s body: “I push unfamiliar blond hair out of my face.” She recalls the events of the night of the fire, and how she moved into Louise’s body as Louise moved into hers. Adele, in Louise’s body, dragged Adele’s body outside, so that it looked as if Louise saved Adele: “Goodbye Adele, hello Louise” (365).

Back in Fairdale, Rob and Adele are smoking marijuana, after Rob does heroin. Adele tells him how she has always been able to carry out astral projection—moving where she wants while lucid dreaming. She tells him that the night of the fire, which she didn’t start, she could have saved her parents, but she was out in the woods watching the animals. Rob tells her he also goes through the second door, but “it weirded me out. I wrote about it in the notebook” (368). The two are feeling very close and happy. Rob suggests they try “[s]omething really mindfuck crazy” (368).

At Adele’s funeral, Rob is speaking, in Louise’s body. He/She thinks about the first time he/she saw David, that weekend in Fairdale, fell in love with him, and decided he/she had to have him. Ten days later, Rob swapped bodies with Adele in Fairdale, killed Rob, and disposed of Rob’s body in the well. Then, after several years, when David fell out of love with Adele, Rob/Adele took over Louise’s body. Now Rob/Louise has David’s full love again.

In the car, the couple discusses their honeymoon. Rob/Louise suggests a cruise. Adam, in the back of the car, reminds his mum that she hates boats. Rob/Louise reassures David that the boy is only being silly and thinks: “There is still one small obstacle to overcome for our happiness to be complete” (373). The couple declare their love for each other.