Freedom and Control

Freedom and Control names a central contradiction in the novel: material comfort can decorate coercion without undoing it. Oskar Latu surrounds Colleen Sherman with costly food, clothes, jewelry, and furnishings, yet keeps her captive, restricts her access to the outside world, and threatens people she cares about. Against that carefully maintained appearance of luxury, Colleen’s insistence on what was taken from her—and Willa Ashford’s refusal to be treated as someone who needs controlling protection—makes freedom a matter of choice, movement, and self-direction rather than comfort.

Captivity Behind Luxury

Colleen’s captivity begins when she plans a sailing trip with Corey Baxter, intending to confess her affair with Oskar and end the relationship. She hopes Corey will choose to break things off, since she does not want to hurt him again; if he does not, she expects to end the relationship herself. The planned confession is an attempt to take responsibility for her own choices. Instead, a man hidden in the boat’s storage compartment strikes Corey in the head. Before Colleen can reach him, another boat arrives and its crew abducts her. Oskar has arranged a private plane to smuggle her out of the country, and she is taken to the place where she remains captive.

The comforts provided there make the deprivation more visible, not less severe. Colleen receives gourmet meals, expensive jewelry, fashionable clothes, fine furnishings, and a computer. Classically trained chefs prepare her food, and another woman shops for her. But the computer has no internet access, and Colleen cannot leave. She describes the experience as horrible: gifts and luxury cannot compensate for the loss of freedom. Willa recognizes the contradiction in the image of a luxurious prison. The apparent generosity does not change who controls the space, who can come and go, or whether Colleen can refuse its owner.

Colleen’s computer does give her a limited means of occupying the time imposed on her: she writes a novel. That activity is not evidence that her captivity has become voluntary or that its restrictions have disappeared. The missing internet connection marks the boundary around even this private pursuit. She can write within the suite, but she cannot use the computer to reconnect with the world beyond it. The distinction is important: a captive may retain small forms of initiative while still being denied the power to leave.

Control Through Threats and Usefulness

Oskar’s control extends beyond Colleen’s confinement. He makes her coach his daughter, Pua Latu, without Pua knowing who is actually providing the instruction. For two years, Colleen watches Pua practice and tells a paid coach what the athlete should do to improve. Oskar threatens to harm Willa and Corey if Colleen refuses. The threat both compels Colleen’s labor and supplies her with information: it is how she learns that Corey survived the blow on the boat. Her continuing work for Pua is therefore not a free professional choice, but a task secured through danger to people she cares about.

The arrangement also shows how control can operate through intermediaries. Oskar hires someone to receive Colleen’s instructions and deliver them to Pua, keeping Colleen’s role hidden while still exploiting her expertise. Pua flourishes under the guidance, unaware that her coach’s advice originates with a woman confined in her father’s home. Colleen’s skill remains active, but Oskar determines where it is used, conceals its source, and ties its continuation to threats. Her usefulness becomes another instrument for keeping her in place.

Oskar’s expectation that Colleen might change her mind and marry him gives the confinement an additional personal dimension. Colleen has already tried to break off the affair, but he would not accept her refusal. Even when he imagines marriage as a possible outcome, the circumstances have stripped that possibility of meaningful consent: he has abducted her and controls whether she can leave. His apparent investment in her comfort cannot make a coerced relationship reciprocal. The same power that supplies the jewelry and meals prevents Colleen from freely accepting or rejecting the future he wants.

Oskar’s Wider Campaign

The coercion surrounding Colleen belongs to a broader effort to control the outcome of Pua’s athletic career. Pua and her partner, Sina, are capable of winning, but Oskar believes they cannot beat Willa. After Willa appears at the tournament despite Oskar believing she was dead, his efforts to remove her as a competitor have failed. He has relied on other people to do the violent work, paying them heavily for their silence rather than getting his own hands dirty. The narrative nevertheless holds him responsible: he set events in motion, including the kidnapping and killings undertaken to give his daughter a chance at the Olympics.

Oskar’s management of Pua’s prospects also shows how his control of Colleen is tied to a goal he treats as more important than her consent. Pua’s shoulder injury has affected her play for much of the season; Oskar has consulted doctors and retained physical therapists, and he believes she is now fully recovered. This tournament is her last chance to earn a place, and, in his view, her Olympic dream will end if she fails. He regards Colleen’s coaching as useful to that ambition, then considers what to do with her once Pua has achieved her goal. He cannot simply release her without risking arrest for holding her captive. The prospect of Colleen’s freedom is thus weighed as a danger to Oskar, not recognized as her right.

That calculation exposes the limits of Oskar’s self-presentation as a provider. His luxurious arrangements and support for Pua coexist with confinement, concealment, threats, and outsourced violence. The comforts may make the household look generous from the outside, but they do not alter the controlling structure beneath it. Oskar decides which people may compete, which work Colleen must perform, and what risks others will face for resisting his plans.

Resistance and the Meaning of Protection

When Willa and Colleen are captured together, Willa understands that they may die in Serenidad and that their bodies may never be found. She worries that Colt Fontaine will blame himself, although she recognizes that her own insistence on going with Tabby contributed to the circumstances. The thought sharpens the distinction between care and control: Colt had wanted to accompany her into the locker room, but Willa had made her own decision, and the danger that follows does not turn her into someone without agency.

During the captors’ forced drive, Willa and Colleen are jostled across the vehicle as it travels over uneven ground. Near the coast, their captors pull them out with rough hands and direct Willa at gunpoint. She tries to bargain, offering that she and Colleen could disappear and return to the United States without exposing the men. Her plea is made under immediate threat, with her hands tied and the sound of the sea growing closer; it is a desperate effort to find a way out, not free agreement to the captors’ terms. The episode makes physical movement itself a measure of control: the captors decide where the women go, while Willa searches for any available opening to survive.

After the rescue, Colt apologizes for not protecting Willa from Oskar. Willa pulls back and tells him she is a grown woman who does not need anyone to protect her. She also reminds him that she knew he would find her and that he did. Her response does not reject their attachment; it rejects the assumption that love makes her responsibility someone else’s to manage. The novel’s distinction is not between care and indifference, but between support that respects another person’s choices and protection that risks treating that person as incapable of choosing.

Significance

The contrast between Colleen’s luxurious suite and her captivity prevents wealth from standing in for freedom. Expensive possessions can soften the visible conditions of confinement, but they cannot provide the ability to refuse, leave, or act without fear for others. Colleen’s hidden coaching, restricted computer, and coerced dependence on Oskar’s decisions give that loss concrete forms; Willa’s attempted negotiation and later insistence on her adult autonomy show resistance under different conditions.

The concept also links personal coercion to Oskar’s ambition for Pua. In both cases, he treats other people’s lives as means to an outcome he has chosen: Colleen’s expertise serves Pua’s development, while Willa’s removal is imagined as a route to Olympic success. The novel makes the cost of that logic visible in the people whose decisions Oskar overrides. Against it, freedom means more than receiving good things. It means retaining the power to say no, to leave, and to determine what one’s own abilities and relationships will serve.