Frances

Frances is a novelist whose retreat at Tranquillum House brings her private humiliations and grief into contact with other people’s losses. She has been deceived by an online romance scam and is still trying to name what it cost her; later, caught inside the retreat’s increasingly dangerous crisis, she acts without time to understand her own decision. Her movement from reluctant confession to sudden intervention and, eventually, sustained companionship with Tony gives her story a shape defined less by a clean transformation than by the risks of speaking and connecting.

Identity and Introduction

Frances is a writer whose books have appeared in foreign-language editions, though her imagined experience of her own work is less a display of success than a startling release of words. In a vision, she sees herself flying through a starry sky with her friend Gillian, a pile of all the books she has written in her lap. The books are open like cereal boxes, and Frances reaches into them to scatter handfuls of words across the sky. Writing appears in the image as something both accumulated and freely given: a career represented by finished books, then opened up into language she can relinquish.

Her retreat also brings her into proximity with grief that is not her own. When Napoleon tells the group that his son died by suicide and that the next day is the third anniversary, the room falls still. Frances presses her lips together, afraid that feeling might escape her as tears, laughter, or something overly intimate. The moment reveals her sensitivity to the social difficulty of grief: she feels the force of another person’s disclosure but cannot immediately find a response that seems proportionate or safe.

The Scam and the Difficulty of Telling

Frances’s clearest account of her own recent wound comes during a massage. She tells the therapist that she fell for an internet romance scam and lost a great deal of money. The therapist does not interrupt or tell her to stop talking; her hands continue moving as Frances speaks. The physical setting gives her a rare opening to narrate an experience she has been holding in, and the therapist’s silence lets the account continue without requiring Frances to defend it.

The financial loss is only part of what she names. Frances says that she worked hard for the money, while acknowledging that other victims lose everything; what she believes she has lost, beyond money, is her self-respect and innocence. This distinction makes the scam’s consequence personal rather than merely economic. She has already gathered the evidence into a file: emails in which she exposed her feelings, cards accompanying flowers whose sentiments were false, and handwritten letters. When a sheet of paper slices her thumb as she puts the folder away, the small injury hurts disproportionately. The archive preserves proof of the deception, but handling it turns memory into a fresh, bodily sting.

Frances’s readiness to listen to other people’s histories is also shaped by loss. In conversation with Masha, she describes how her father was killed when a woman driving a car failed to stop at a pedestrian crossing because the sun was in her eyes; her father had been out walking. The account is plain and specific, an ordinary lapse with irreversible consequences. Masha responds with her own story: her father was shot in a market by a hitman working for the Russian mafia, who mistook him for someone else. Frances is taken aback by the revelation. Their contrasting accounts place accidental death beside mistaken identity and show how the two women begin to exchange personal histories rather than remain only fellow guests.

Vision and the Unsteady Retreat

Frances’s experience of the retreat is not confined to waking conversation. In one vision, she flies with Gillian in a sleigh drawn by white horses beneath a star-filled sky. The books in her lap contain all her writing, including editions in other languages, but their pages function less like a record of achievement than like a source she can reach into and scatter. The vision gives her private creative life a vivid, expansive form, while its dreamlike looseness contrasts with the shame and self-consciousness that mark her account of the scam.

Later, Frances pulls headphones from her head, disentangling them from her hair while keeping her eyes shut. The scene resolves into recognition: she is on a flight, the one place where she falls asleep wearing headphones. The abrupt return to an ordinary explanation underscores how the retreat’s altered experiences can give way to familiar settings without warning. Frances’s story therefore includes not only what she chooses to tell but also moments in which the frame of her experience shifts before she can fully orient herself.

The Locked Room and the Crisis Around Masha

When the guests are trapped in the studio, Frances contributes a bracelet to the group’s improvised effort to pick the lock. The others who take up the task are Ben, Jessica, Napoleon, Tony, and Carmel, using whatever might serve as a tool, including a hairclip and a belt buckle. Frances has little practical expertise and stays out of the way while the group discusses how to push the lock’s pins. Her contribution is materially modest, but it places her among people trying to solve their confinement together. She then turns her attention to Zoe, who is sitting in a corner with her knees drawn up.

The hours pass without anyone arriving, and the guests keep returning to the keypad, entering random combinations. Frances’s earlier attempt to assist with the lock belongs to a larger condition of uncertainty: the group cannot simply leave, and repeated efforts produce no clear way out. In this constrained setting, attention moves between practical improvisation and the emotional needs of other guests, as Frances’s decision to seek out Zoe shows.

The crisis becomes physical when Masha lunges at Heather with a two-hundred-year-old letter opener in her hand. Frances later cannot reconstruct how she decided what to do; she remembers that her brain seemed to short-circuit and that she suddenly had a heavy candelabrum in her hand. The next moment, Masha is on the floor at Frances’s feet, while Frances holds her hands up as a police officer points a gun at her and orders her not to move. The sequence is narrated through gaps in Frances’s own understanding: she can recall the dangerous objects and the outcome, but not a considered chain of choices between them.

The officer is Gus, the boyfriend of Jan, the massage therapist. He does not charge Frances with Masha’s murder because Masha is alive. After a few terrifying moments, Masha sits up, touches the back of her head, and tells Frances that she is fired, effective immediately. Frances’s impulsive intervention has prevented the confrontation from ending in Masha’s death, but it also leads directly to her dismissal. In the same arrival, Jan and Gus bring another piece of the emergency into view: Jan had become suspicious when Tranquillum House staff were sent away during a retreat, an unusual occurrence, and connected Gus’s account of stopping a speeding girl in a yellow Lamborghini to the possibility that Delilah had taken a guest’s car. Their suspicions explain why they came to the house in the middle of the night.

After the Retreat

Frances’s capacity to stay with another person’s distress becomes more visible after the retreat. Napoleon goes to his doctor, Allison, and tells her about Zach, the drugs he received at Tranquillum House, and his fear that the experience may have contributed to his depression. He describes his concern about antidepressant dosages and the possibility of suicidal thoughts during the initial period of treatment; he has researched medication, knows the brand names and side effects, and has even prepared a spreadsheet. He also wonders whether he and Zach shared a sensitivity to drugs. Although he believes the people at the resort meant well and allows that the depression might have arisen anyway, he feels he may have been the one person who should never have been given the smoothie. He ends by admitting that he is terrified. Frances is not identified as the person receiving this disclosure, but the scene places the guests’ retreat experience within an aftermath of fear and unresolved questions about care and responsibility.

Two months later, Frances and Tony are walking in different states, nine hundred kilometres apart. They have made a habit of keeping each other company during walks around their respective neighbourhoods. At first they held their mobile phones to their ears; after Tony’s daughter Mimi suggested headphones, they adopted them and could walk longer without their ears aching. The practical adjustment makes companionship easier to sustain across distance. For Frances, who has spoken of lost self-respect and struggled to make sense of a sudden act, this recurring shared walk offers not a dramatic cure but a dependable way of being alongside someone. Her story ends with connection maintained through an ordinary routine, far from the retreat’s locked doors and immediate emergencies.