Our Father, who art in heaven

The opening of the Lord’s Prayer becomes a repeated plea in the burning Tranquillum House: Jessica murmurs its first words while the nine guests huddle under wet towels, and Frances listens amid the flames. The prayer’s incompleteness matters as much as its words. Jessica cannot get beyond the invocation, while Frances, raised Anglican but long removed from religion, wonders whether asking for deliverance without first offering thanks would be poor manners.

The Prayer in the Fire

As Tranquillum House burns, the nine guests shelter in the furthest corner of the yoga and meditation studio, wet towels draped over their heads and shoulders. Frances listens to the hungry flames and wonders whether the crash she has just heard was the beautiful staircase. She remembers Yao’s assurance from the first day that they would not sink and imagines fire consuming the staircase’s beautiful wood. Against that destruction, Jessica murmurs the prayer into her knees, repeating its opening invocation.

Jessica’s Repetition

Frances would not have expected Jessica to be a believer, but the scene leaves the question unresolved: Jessica may not be one, since she seems unable to continue beyond the prayer’s opening words. The repetition makes the familiar formula a gesture of immediate need rather than a complete statement of faith. In a room full of people confronting the burning house, the words offer a ritual to hold on to, even as Jessica’s inability to proceed gives the prayer a strikingly uncertain edge.

Frances and Gratitude

The prayer also turns Frances inward. She was brought up Anglican but lost her religion sometime in the late 1980s. In the danger of the fire, she considers that it might be bad manners to pray for deliverance after going so long without saying thank you; she imagines that God might have appreciated a thank-you card over the years. Her thought is comic in its domestic politeness, but it also exposes a genuine tension: she reaches toward the possibility of prayer while measuring the distance created by years of neglect.

Memory and Contrast

Frances’s next thought gives that reckoning a specific, intimate shape: she remembers a long, hot, sex-filled summer in Europe with Sol. The recollection does not resolve her question about faith, but it places gratitude beside a vivid memory of pleasure and the life she has lived outside religious observance. In the burning studio, the prayer’s repeated opening and Frances’s private inventory coexist: one is spoken aloud in fear, the other silently recalls what might have merited thanks.