Don't Let Him In

On Boxing Day, Ash is irritated when Nina announces that Nick will be spending the holiday with them. When Nick arrives, she asks him where the soaps are from. He tells her they are from a shop in Mayfair, near the wine bar. Ash says she will stop by the wine bar sometime, but he tells her that, as of the previous week, he is no longer a co-owner there—he is moving on to new opportunities.

Ash can see that Nina is confused about why he hasn’t mentioned this to her. Nick distracts Nina by announcing that he made an offer on the Bangate Cove property. He would still like it to be a Paddy’s restaurant, but he will finance it for her. He tells her she has time to think it over, as his offer on the property has not officially been accepted yet.

Martha spends Boxing Day alone with her children. Alistair claimed that he needs to find his mother, who has supposedly wandered away from home. Martha decides to search the doctor’s bag again. When she discovers that the second phone is missing, she finally accepts that Alistair is having an affair. She finds a receipt from a Paddy’s restaurant and remembers going to one in Whitstable, years ago, with Alistair. They met the owner, who seemed like a charming man. When she looks at the receipt closely, she realizes that it is from a different Paddy’s, one in Ramsgate. It is from the night that Nala had to go to the hospital, and the only item charged was a bottle of champagne.

Three years earlier, Nick has been living with Martha for a year since murdering Tara. He is happy with Martha but a little hurt that she loves a fictional creation of him. She believes he works in hospitality training, the reason behind his travel, but the truth is that he is working as a paid escort. He wants to leave this work behind and build a more fulfilling career, but he knows he has to be cautious after killing Tara. He is alarmed when, one day, he sees a news report that Tara’s torso has been found in a woodland in Essex.

Now, a few days after Christmas, Ash travels to the London neighborhood where Nick once lived with Laura. The young couple now living in the house tells Ash where to find Petula, their landlord; Petula tells Ash that Laura was scammed by her husband, Justin, who was, in her words, a “[p]sychopath” who manipulated Laura. Justin abandoned Laura and their daughters with thousands of pounds in debt.

Petula has no idea where Laura is now, but she is able to tell Ash that Laura’s last name is Drummond and provide Laura’s date of birth and her daughters’ names. With this information, Ash tracks Laura online; she sends Laura an email explaining her situation and asking Laura to contact her.

When “Alistair” returns home, he says he has to go to his mother’s house for several days. Martha asks who will watch Nala while she works, and he suggests she close the shop until the new year. She doesn’t want to, but he says he is exhausted from caring for his mother and sad about being away from Martha. He tears up, but she resists the urge to comfort him. She agrees to close the shop temporarily, but inside, she is thinking that everything he is saying is a lie.

Two years earlier and two years into Nick’s relationship with Martha, the police have made no progress in finding Tara. Nick feels that killing and dismembering Tara unlocked a new part of him. He now understands how his sexuality is tied to violence, and his potential for violence excites him and makes him feel more powerful.

One evening, he takes Martha to a restaurant he has not been to before: Paddy’s, in Whitstable. Paddy comes out of the kitchen. He is shorter and rounder than Nick, but it is clear that he is popular with his customers. When Martha says that she thinks he must be the owner, Nick feels a surge of jealousy at her tone.

Suddenly, he remembers meeting Paddy once before while he was working at a restaurant in Mayfair. Paddy caught Nick lounging outside and sharply told him to get back to work. Nick is furious that this man, whom he does not respect, has created his own restaurant empire and is admired. Paddy comes by their table, and Nick is convinced he is flirting with Martha.

Now, when Ash returns to work, she finds out from Marcelline that the pink box of soaps came from a shop in a Kent village. Ash is unsuccessful at finding anything about the shop online. She gets a message from Laura, who says that Ash is not the first person who has contacted her about Justin. She suggests that they meet in London in two days.

Martha has not heard from her husband for several days. She notices a discrepancy in her business accounts and begins a careful investigation. By the end of the day, she sees that the business is missing nearly £3,000. That evening, Grace brings over wine and assures Martha that she will help her in any way she can.

After seeing what Martha has discovered in her accounts, Grace recommends that she see an accountant and a lawyer. Martha wants to give her husband a chance to explain himself. She texts him that she is going to see a lawyer, and he immediately calls her. He says that he took the money as a security blanket and did not intend to spend it. Then his mother needed care, and now, the money is gone. He swears he will pay her back after his mother dies and begs Martha to forgive him. In the background, Martha hears seagulls and waves breaking, and she knows that he is not at his mother’s supposed home in the West Midlands.

Nick investigates Paddy’s background and is disappointed to learn that Paddy is a self-made man who rose from a lower-class background with hard work and skill. Nick grew up privileged, and he is furious that he is not further ahead in life than Paddy. Jealous of Paddy’s financial success and his family life, Nick finds and stalks Ash in London to learn as much about her as he can.

One night, he follows her to a pub and, listening in on her conversation with friends, discovers that she has a crush on her married boss, Ritchie Lloyd. Ash says that she would never pursue the crush, but when one of the friends mentions that Ritchie has a vacation home in Ibiza, Nick hears Ash groan and tell them to stop telling her things that make him seem even more attractive.

Two years earlier, Nick visits one of his clients, Jesse, a wealthy woman in her late sixties. Jesse wants to give him something, but he is dismayed when it turns out to be a pebble that she is sentimentally attached to. She asks him to carry it and use it as motivation to find his path in life. He thinks of his own wealthy mother, who cut him out of her will, and he wants to shove the pebble down Jesse’s throat. As soon as he leaves her place, he tosses the pebble away. Later, he heads for Dover to spy on Nina.

Ash and Jane meet with Laura in London. As Laura talks, the warm glow on her face makes Ash suspect that Laura is still in love with “Justin.” She says that he always knew exactly what she wanted and gave it to her—if he couldn’t, he would “find a way to make [her] believe that [she] didn’t want it” (252). For a long time, he made her deliriously happy, but eventually, something shifted. He claimed his mother was ill and started disappearing. He always had an explanation, and Laura was so focused on recapturing what they had once shared that she accepted his excuses. Eventually, he disappeared completely; bills began arriving, and Laura realized that he secretly ran up a large debt that she was now responsible for.

Laura also shares that Emma, Tara’s daughter, contacted her four years ago, after Tara’s mysterious disappearance. Ash is horrified to learn that Emma suspects “Jonathan” of her mother’s murder, and he has a history of stalking and harassing women on the street. Ash decides that she needs to talk to Emma and try again to talk to Nina.

When Ash arrives home, she works hard to be friendly to Nick to lull his suspicions. She mentions that she wants to buy a friend some of the soap he bought her; after a brief hesitation, he smoothly tells her that he bought the soaps a while ago, and the shop has since closed. Later, she texts Marcelline’s ex-boyfriend, Jason, to ask where his mother did her shopping. He tells her Enderford, and she goes online to make a list of potential shops. She decides to visit them on the following day.

Martha takes the day off work and drives to Folkestone. She stops at the restaurant where the tracker, when it was working, indicated Alistair had parked for a while, but they don’t know who he is. She next drives to the large seaside house where she also saw the tracker stop. No one seems to be home, but she can see from looking in the windows that a woman lives there. She also sees a photo of Paddy Swann and realizes that this was his house before he died. She thinks of the receipt she found in Alistair’s pocket and realizes that Alistair must be having an affair with Nina Swann.

Twenty-one months earlier, Nick learns everything he can about Paddy. During his surveillance of the Swanns, he learns that Nina is having an affair with a man named Ethan. Because he has been spending his own money on his spying activities and is now nearly broke, for the first time, he tries to get money from Martha. He asks to see her shop’s books, telling Martha that he will take over her accounting to save her some money. A few weeks later, he discovers that Paddy Swann is also having an affair, with one of his employees.

At Martha’s Garden in Enderford, Ash finally tracks down the origin of the pink box of soaps. She shows the young woman at the counter a photo of Nick. The woman tells her that it is Alistair, the owner’s husband. When Ash learns that “Alistair” has supposedly been away caring for his elderly mother, she understands why Nick has been able to spend so much time at Nina’s house lately. As she leaves the shop, Ash gets a text from Jane, who has located Emma.

Three months before the narrative present, on his first date with Nina, Nick discovers she is more interesting and engaging than he imagined. He learns that Nina loves dogs, but Paddy would never agree to having one. She also tells him that Paddy worked such long hours that she often felt very alone, he was a hard man to live with, and now, she finds running his restaurants to be exhausting and unfulfilling. When Nick asks how Nina and the children are coping with Paddy’s death, Nina confides that she is concerned about Ash, who idolized her father. Ash has, she says, always been a bit immature and needed more attention than other children.

Nina explains what happened to Ash during the previous summer in London. She had a nice apartment, friends, and a job in publishing, and Nina was proud that she finally seemed to be growing up and gaining independence. Then the police came to Ash’s apartment to question her about allegedly stalking her boss. Ash believed he had sent her love letters saying where he would be at different times and asking her to be there and take photos of him. She eventually showed up during his family holiday in Ibiza, claiming that he had invited her. Ash was briefly hospitalized in a mental health facility and eventually diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Now, Ash meets with Emma, and they share information about Nick. Emma shows Ash the timeline she constructed that shows his movements and relationships. Emma shares her conviction that the torso found in Essex belonged to her mother and that Nick killed her. She says that the woman he was staying with in Tooting is the missing link—finding her will lead them to important information needed to catch Nick once and for all. She advises Ash to do everything she can to keep Nick from suspecting that she is onto him.

Nick mysteriously vanishes from the Swann home. On their Ring camera, Ash and Nina see that a small, middle-aged blonde woman came to their house that morning, rang the bell, and then went away. Ash thinks that this is likely Martha. A little while later, they see Nick leaving the house carrying a rucksack and his doctor’s bag.

Nina is confused, and Ash decides to tell her what she has learned about Nick. Because Ash knows much more than the last time she tried to voice her suspicions to Nina, Nina believes her this time. She is furious at herself for being so gullible. She apologizes to Ash for not believing her sooner. They agree to go together to Enderford in the morning to see Martha.

Nick asks Jesse for a place to stay for a week. After hearing his sad story about having to rent out his home to pay for his elderly mother’s medical care, she reluctantly agrees. He is furious that Martha tracked him to Nina’s house. He sobs, thinking that his world is once again falling apart because of the collision of two women who are meant to stay separate.

Jesse comforts him, thinking he is upset about his mother. She tells him about her estrangement from her own children, and he thinks that all his problems would be solved if Jesse left him her money. After dinner, he goes for a walk and vents some of his frustration by following and frightening a young woman on the street.

In the morning, Nina and Ash go to Martha’s shop. After introducing themselves, they explain what they know about Nick/Alistair. Martha struggles to reconcile the two sides of the man she knows as Alistair—the perfect, loving, wonderful husband and the scheming, manipulative con artist. Although part of her still longs for her life with Alistair, she agrees with Nina that they must cooperate to expose him.

Martha sends Nick a text, pretending to be anxious about where he is and begging him to come home. She confesses to being worried that he was having an affair and trying to follow his movements, but she says that she understands now that her suspicions were groundless. Nick decides to think about it before agreeing to come back. First, he has to decide whether Jesse is a better option.

Ash meets Jane at Bar Amelie. Inside, they ask questions about the owners and learn that Luke Berner supposedly died by suicide three years ago. They meet Jensen de Witt, the bar’s remaining owner. He tells them that Nick is “a madman” and “a crook” (367). He tells them that Nick tried to sabotage their business, using fake usernames to leave terrible online reviews and even letting a rat loose in the kitchen, and then calling a health inspector. The harassment finally stopped after Luke’s death.

Ash secretly goes to visit Joe Kritner, the man who killed her father. She knows that Kritner claimed a “Silver Man” gave him £50 to allegedly help thwart a terrorist plot by pushing Paddy under the train. When Ash shows him Nick’s picture, he identifies Nick as the Silver Man. Ash finds out where Joe was standing when Nick approached him so that she can find CCTV footage of the conversation. As soon as Ash is back outside again, she calls Nina, who says that she will call the police immediately.

Nick texts Martha to say he will be coming home soon, and he promises to be a better husband to her. He realizes that he genuinely still loves her and is happy to be going home.