The Good Samaritan

Four months after the death of David, the man from the Prologue, Laura arrives for her volunteer shift at End of the Line, bringing cupcakes for her colleagues. She greets Kevin and Zoe, fellow volunteers, as well as Mary. After tidying the kitchenette, she settles into her preferred booth, which offers more privacy. She reflects on the office’s unspoken hierarchy and how her secret motivations differ from those of the other volunteers.

Kevin thanks Laura for the cupcakes and for mending a shirt for him, calling her the office mother figure. Laura internally agrees, recognizing that this helpful and non-threatening persona is a deliberate disguise that allows her to carry out her activities without raising suspicion.

During her shift, Laura scrolls through private photos on her phone before opening her notebook. She answers the phone and speaks with a woman named Carole. Carole describes her financial troubles and unhappy marriage, telling Laura she needs a solution. Laura’s interest grows as she listens. Her hopes are dashed, however, when she realizes that Carole is not considering suicide but is merely planning to leave her husband for another man. Laura maintains a nonjudgmental tone until Carole hangs up. Disappointed, Laura dismisses the call as a waste of time and waits for the next one, hoping for a caller with more potential.

After her shift, Laura goes shopping and then arrives home, where she doctors a store-bought cake to pass it off as homemade and stages sewing repairs she outsourced to someone else, all to maintain her capable reputation with her fellow volunteers. As she walks through the house, she deliberately steps on the tail of her daughter Alice’s cat, Bieber. She checks on Alice’s room before secretly logging into the Facebook account of her older daughter, Effie.

Laura feels a surge of jealousy looking at photos of the adolescent Effie and discovers private messages she exchanged with a boy named Matt. She ignores a third, closed bedroom door in the hallway. Unhappy with her own reflection, which has changed since a bout with ovarian cancer, she takes illicit slimming pills. She then finds a newspaper article about the recent death of a woman named Chantelle and carefully cuts it out.

Laura works an evening shift at the helpline. She fields a call from a pregnant teenager and another from a prankster before a young man named Steven calls. Steven is lonely, depressed, and admits he is considering suicide. Laura methodically assesses him, noting his suicidal thoughts and a previous attempt. He fits her criteria.

To test his commitment, Laura employs a “fear-then-relief technique,” challenging the caller’s seriousness to provoke a stronger reaction. Steven grows distressed but insists he truly wants to die before hanging up. Laura remembers David and feels a similar connection. She has a good feeling about Steven and looks forward to helping him die.

Laura attends the funeral of Chantelle Taylor at a local crematorium. While waiting outside, she sees an unhoused friend named Nate and gives him money before heading inside. During the service, she observes Chantelle’s children with disdain. Laura manipulated Chantelle, who had an addiction to heroin, during her calls to the helpline. Laura encouraged Chantelle’s drug use and convinced her that her children would be better off without her. Laura ultimately listened on the phone as Chantelle administered a fatal overdose.

After the funeral, Laura takes a copy of the order of service. She adds it to a secret collection of trophies from her victims, bringing the total number of items to 15.

Back in the End of the Line kitchenette, Kevin and Zoe praise Laura for the cake she brought in. The branch manager, Janine Thomson, arrives, and Laura reflects on her intense dislike for the woman. Laura recalls a time Janine flirted with Laura’s husband, Tony, and thinks about how she recently discovered Janine’s secret online gambling addiction, saving screenshots as evidence.

The interaction triggers memories of Laura’s connection with David. She recalls that David’s wife had been murdered, leaving him unable to cope. Laura admits to herself that she tried to keep him alive for selfish reasons but eventually agreed to his final request: to find someone willing to die with him.

Feeling the negative side effects of her diet pills, Laura observes Alice on the school playground, having apparently just dropped her off. Afterward, she drives to a residential care facility to visit her son, Henry. Henry is in a wheelchair and non-verbal, and Laura considers him her “anchor” in life. She gently cleans him and tends to his physical needs, feeling a sense of purpose in these small acts. When Laura was diagnosed with cancer, Tony insisted that they could no longer care for Henry at home and forced her to place him in the permanent care facility. Overwhelmed with guilt about this, Laura holds Henry’s hand, feeling his pulse ground her.

Steven calls the helpline again. Laura pretends not to remember him, forcing him to restate his plans to die by suicide. Once he confirms his intentions, she ends the call abruptly but makes a mistake, accidentally calling him “David.”

The slip triggers a memory of orchestrating the suicide pact for David. Laura recruited a pregnant woman with prenatal depression by encouraging her to visit pro-suicide online forums. She arranged for the two to meet at Birling Gap, a coastal cliff. Laura remembers listening on two separate phones as David and the woman met before jumping to their deaths, feeling a mixture of pride in her success and envy that she could not be with David herself. Her reverie is broken by Janine, who tells her to answer a ringing phone.

Laura notices police officers in Janine’s office and feels a surge of panic, fearing that they are there to investigate her connection to Steven. She sees that her colleague, Sanjay, is also in the office with them. After the officers leave, Janine explains that they were investigating Chantelle Taylor’s death to find her drug dealer, not the suicide itself.

Relieved, Laura recommits to her plan with Steven but resolves to be more cautious. She internally reviews her five rules for handling candidates, which demand complete transparency from them while giving her absolute control. She reflects on her extensive knowledge of various suicide methods, confident in her ability to manage Steven without getting caught.

While in a coffee shop, Laura reflects on her past as an anonymous online suicide advisor who gained the alias the “Freer of Lost Souls.” She began volunteering at End of the Line to establish a more personal, hands-on connection with her subjects.

In the present, Laura recognizes the barista as Matt, the boy from her daughter Effie’s Facebook messages. She confirms that he sent Effie a nude photograph. Enraged, Laura takes a screenshot of the image. She then posts the picture on the coffee chain’s corporate Twitter account, Matt’s personal and family Facebook pages, and the page for his school. Finally, she posts the image on Effie’s own Facebook account and changes the password, locking her out.