50 pages • 1-hour read
The Arrangement
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Themes
Control and Manipulation Disguised as Love
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and emotional abuse.
In The Arrangement, Modglin exposes how love becomes a weapon when wielded by individuals determined to possess rather than cherish their partners. Through Ainsley and Peter’s increasingly toxic dynamic, the novel demonstrates that genuine affection can be perverted into a form of psychological imprisonment, where control masquerades as devotion and manipulation is reframed as sacrifice.
Ainsley exemplifies this destructive pattern through her elaborate orchestration of Stefan’s murder, which she presents to Peter as the ultimate expression of marital commitment. Her confession reveals the calculated nature of her “gift”—she deliberately sought out a police officer, fabricated stories of domestic abuse, and manipulated Stefan’s protective instincts to create a scenario where Peter would kill him. Yet Ainsley frames this manipulation as an act of love, telling Peter, “I’ve given us a gift. I’ve made our sins equal” (199). She transforms murder into a romantic gesture, arguing that sharing such a profound secret will bind them together permanently. This twisted logic reveals how she weaponizes the concept of partnership, using their shared culpability as emotional blackmail disguised as intimacy.
Peter’s serial-killing activities demonstrate another facet of love corrupted by control. To him, his 15 murders over the years are justified through his role as a provider and protector—maintaining the family’s suburban facade requires eliminating any threats to their carefully constructed normalcy. When he kills Illiana, he tells himself that it’s to protect Ainsley from further harassment, transforming murder into an act of chivalric devotion. His hidden room beneath their home symbolizes the compartmentalization required to maintain this performance, where his identity as a loving father and husband coexists with his nature as predator.
The couple’s mutual blackmail represents the ultimate perversion of their marriage vows. Ainsley explicitly tells Peter, “[Your] only choice now is to kill me yourself or stay with me forever. I own your secret now, Peter. I own you” (197). Their relationship transforms into a prison where escape equals destruction and staying equals complicity. The phrase “for better or worse” becomes a sinister mantra justifying increasingly extreme behaviors (197). Through this dark portrait, Modglin reveals how the rhetoric of eternal commitment can become a tool of entrapment when love is redefined as possession, suggesting that true intimacy requires freedom rather than a forced bond.
The Erosion of Truth in Intimate Relationships
Modglin constructs a marriage built on layers of deception that gradually consume all possibility of authentic connection, revealing how the accumulation of secrets transforms intimate partners into strangers performing scripted roles. In the novel, truth becomes not a foundation for trust but a commodity to be strategically withheld, deployed, or fabricated, ultimately rendering genuine intimacy impossible as both spouses become actors in an elaborate performance of marital normalcy.
The novel unfolds through a careful revelation of increasingly devastating secrets that demonstrate how deception compounds exponentially in relationships. Peter’s initial affairs represent the first breach, followed by the reveal of his bisexuality and relationship with Seth, then his serial-killer identity spanning 15 murders. Each revelation forces a new understanding of his character, mirroring Ainsley’s experience of discovering that her husband is fundamentally unknowable. Similarly, Ainsley’s calculated manipulation of Stefan’s murder reveals that her entire personality—from her apparent naivety about their marital problems to her shock at Stefan’s death—has been carefully constructed theater. These progressive revelations create a sense that truth in their marriage has become endlessly deferred, with each disclosure suggesting deeper layers of deception beneath.
The couple’s agreement to “total honesty” becomes deeply ironic given their continued withholding of crucial information. Even as they promise transparency, Peter conceals his serial-killer activities while Ainsley hides her knowledge of his affairs and her manipulation of Stefan’s murder. Their moment of supposed complete confession becomes another performance, with both parties strategically revealing only enough truth to maintain their precarious balance of power. The sealed envelope that Ainsley uses to test Peter’s trustworthiness early in the novel serves as a metaphor for this dynamic—she knows that he will violate the boundary, prepares for his betrayal, and uses his predictable dishonesty to maintain psychological superiority.
The novel suggests that once the truth becomes negotiable between partners, authentic intimacy dies, replaced by an exhausting performance where each person becomes both an actor and the audience to their spouse’s elaborate lies. “Sorry, honey. Rules are rules” becomes Ainsley’s recurring reminder that their relationship operates according to hidden scripts rather than genuine emotion (31). Modglin demonstrates that marriages can survive almost any revelation except the discovery that the truth itself has become weaponized, transforming confession from a pathway to connection into another tool of manipulation and control.
The Performance of Domestic Normalcy as Survival
In The Arrangement, Modglin reveals how the pursuit of suburban respectability becomes a survival mechanism that ultimately supersedes moral behavior, as both Ainsley and Peter develop such expertise in performing normalcy that maintaining appearances becomes more important than addressing the corruption beneath their carefully constructed facade. The novel demonstrates that domestic rituals and social conventions can serve as elaborate camouflage for the darkest human impulses when the performance of virtue replaces actual virtue.
Peter’s architectural career provides the perfect metaphor for this dynamic, as his ability to design beautiful exteriors conceals his construction of hidden spaces for horrific purposes. His secret room beneath their home represents the literal foundation of their domestic life—a torture chamber and morgue disguised as the structural support for their family’s daily routines. The juxtaposition between his public identity as a loving father who helps with homework and his private identity as a serial killer who collects underwear from his victims reveals how completely he has compartmentalized his existence. When he kills Illiana, he frames it as protecting his family’s stability, bringing these two spheres of his life together and demonstrating how he has learned to transform murder into domestic duty.
Ainsley’s manipulation of Stefan’s death further illustrates how the couple uses domestic concerns to justify extraordinary violence. She orchestrates his murder not from passion or sudden rage but from a calculated desire to repair her marriage and secure her family’s future. The elaborate cover-up—from disposing of evidence to creating alibis—is presented as protecting their children’s innocence rather than concealing a crime. Their decision to pour a concrete patio over Stefan’s burial site transforms their front yard into both a crime scene and a symbol of their reconstructed domestic space, where family barbecues will literally take place above a murder victim.
The couple’s ability to maintain friendships and social obligations while harboring deadly secrets reveals the extent to which performance has replaced authenticity in their lives. They host dinner parties with Glennon and Seth, attend family events, and manage school routines with the same meticulous attention they bring to concealing evidence. Their children notice nothing amiss because their parents have become expert performers of suburban normalcy. Through this portrayal, Modglin suggests that the pressure to maintain social respectability can become so overwhelming that it transforms ordinary people into monsters, as the performance of virtue gradually replaces any commitment to actual virtue, leaving only the hollow shell of domestic respectability.
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