The Arrangement

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, antigay bias, and emotional abuse.

Ainsley functions as the primary protagonist and one of the narrators, embodying the archetype of the manipulative mastermind disguised as a desperate wife. She presents herself as a fixer who “solve[s] problems with an unyielding sword” (5), yet her methodical approach to repairing her marriage reveals a calculating and ruthless personality beneath her suburban façade and illustrates Control and Manipulation Disguised as Love. Ainsley’s character demonstrates dynamic development not because she changes but because the narrative peels back layers of deception, revealing that she is not an apparently victimized wife but a cold-blooded orchestrator of murder.

Her most defining trait is her need for control, which manifests in her meticulous planning and ability to manipulate situations to her advantage. When she proposes the open-marriage arrangement to Peter, she immediately establishes rules and contingencies, demonstrating her compulsive need to manage every variable. This control extends to her revelation that she “knew about [his] affairs. All of them” and had been monitoring Peter’s infidelity for months before implementing her elaborate scheme (195). Her psychological manipulation reaches its apex when she admits to deliberately framing Peter as abusive to make him protective of her, coldly calculating that “when [he] did exactly what [she’d] hoped for, [she] knew [she] had [him]” (197).