55 pages • 1 hour read
His & Hers
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Chapters 60-68Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 60 Summary: “Her: Friday 14:30”
Anna wakes up in the hospital to find Jack by her bed. Both he and her mother will recover from their wounds, and he tells her about Mrs. Andrews’s cancer. The police have now found evidence at the Kelly house linking her to each murder, including childhood diaries in which Catherine detailed how much she hated the others. They have yet to find the knife. Anna struggles to believe that Cat plotted such horrific revenge.
Jack and Anna discuss the future. Jack will take custody of his niece, Olivia, and move back to London, and Anna intends to place her mother in care, paying for it to keep her mother from needing to sell the house.
Chapter 61 Summary: “Him: Friday 14:45”
Jack leaves, and both he and Anna wonder if they’ll get back together.
Chapter 62 Summary: “Her: Friday 15:00”
Anna leaves the hospital against medical advice. She is relieved to see that the knife is still inside her purse.
Chapter 63 Summary
It was important that Mrs. Andrews make herself look like a victim, but she thinks the facts speak for themselves. She was present at all the murders, though her lies are so compelling that she almost believes them.
Chapter 64 Summary: “Him”
Six months later, Jack now lives and works part-time in London, caring for his niece. Priya heads up his former unit in Blackdown.
Chapter 65 Summary: “Her”
Anna is an anchor again. She’s moved into a small house with a yard that holds her mother’s beehives, which is where she stashed the knife. Jack and Olivia have moved in with her. She feels that she did what she had to do and has chosen to forget the ordeal.
Chapter 66 Summary: “Him”
Anna and Jack go to Blackdown, intending to visit Mrs. Andrews at her care facility. Anna is renting out her mother’s old house. She puts in a patio where the vegetable patch used to be and does all the work herself.
Chapter 67 Summary: “Her”
They arrive at the retirement village. Anna enjoys the sight of someone cleaning for her mother after years of her mother doing it for everyone else. Her mother asks Anna if they found the knife in the hive. Anna says no, and they both pretend it’s the dementia talking. Her mother tells them that Priya has visited her.
Chapter 68 Summary
Mrs. Andrews finally reveals herself as the murderer. She knew no one would suspect an old lady with dementia.
When people started confusing her drunkenness for senility months ago, Mrs. Andrews encouraged the misconception, hoping Anna would hear about it and visit. Jack insisted she see a doctor, who diagnosed her with cancer. As she packed up the house, she discovered Anna’s nearly burned suicide note. She always blamed herself because she believed Anna left because of her father’s death. After finding the note, she blamed the three girls for her separation from her daughter.
Still in possession of her former clients’ house keys, she began faking dementia episodes intentionally. She intended to frame Jack as punishment for leaving Anna and having a relationship with Rachel. However, when she witnessed Jack and Anna reconnecting, her plans changed.
She broke into the Kellys’ house to find clues about Catherine’s whereabouts and recognized Cat Jones, whom she blamed for stealing Anna’s job. To lure Cat back to Blackdown, she stole Richard’s phone and sent a message implying that he had seen pictures from that night in the woods and demanding Cat bring the children to her parents’ house to talk. After Cat arrived and put the children to bed, Mrs. Andrews took them. She left a note pretending that she would murder them unless Cat killed herself. She drugged the girls and left them sleeping in a nearby shed.
Mrs. Andrews wanted Cat to die by suicide so everyone would blame her for the murders. However, Cat outsmarted her, using her sailing expertise to tie knots she could release. Mrs. Andrews didn’t expect Anna and Richard to show up. When Richard came upstairs, she stabbed him and bashed his head and then hid from Anna. When Cat followed them into the woods, she worried that Cat would tell Anna and the police. Cat demanded to know where her daughters were and stabbed Mrs. Andrews when she refused to tell her. She thinks that Anna might suspect her of killing the women because she hid the knife.
In the present, Olivia asks about the red-and-white friendship bracelet Mrs. Andrews is making, which Mrs. Andrews claims is a present for someone else, implying that she intends to kill Priya the next time she visits.
Chapter 60-68 Analysis
The end of the novel resolves its central mystery while still calling attention to the difficulty of finding the truth despite apparent evidence and an available narrative that explains it all. Jack assures Anna that Cat Jones, now dead, was the murderer. Although she “was very good at covering her tracks and trying to make other people look responsible […] evidence was found at her house linking her to each of the murders” (276). Even Cat’s own words are turned against her. The police discover “childhood diaries, in which she went into quite graphic detail about how much she hated” the women (276). Truth, Lies, and Narrative work against Cat because the fiction is supported by tangible evidence and insights into Cat’s private thoughts, supposedly reliable evidence that Mrs. Andrews has manipulated to construct a credible narrative. Anna privately admits, “It’s hard to believe, but everyone else seems to” (277). She, at least, suspects the truth. Mrs. Andrews further complicates the idea of a potentially reliable narrative by suggesting that “the facts speak for themselves” in a passage from the still-unidentified murderer’s point of view (283). She declares, “It was important to make myself look like a victim, in order for everyone to believe my story” (283). She lists each murder, attesting that she was present at the scene of the crime, and claims, “There is no such thing as coincidence” (283). However, the text never suggests that Mrs. Andrews was present at the murders. Instead, it implies that this passage comes from Anna’s perspective, the person who—coincidentally—was present at each crime scene. After all, “Nobody suspects a little old lady with dementia of killing people” (298), as Mrs. Andrews knows. She has tried on and cast off identities her entire life, underscoring the theme of Identity: Nurture, Nature, and Rupture because she has never had an integrated, consistent identity, and the “little old lady with dementia” is just another identity that serves her purpose.
The final section also emphasizes people’s vulnerability to one another, figured in the vulnerability of their homes. Houses are both safe havens for their secrets and spaces that can be invaded. Mrs. Andrews, as she enters into the private domains of others under the innocuous guise of a cleaner, embodies this dual aspect. When boxing up her mother’s things, Anna finds a drawer full of keys. She observes that her mother had “so many years of letting herself into other people’s houses, to do their dirty work while they were out doing something else” (295). Mrs. Andrews could breach these homes, learn people’s secrets, and kill their owners. Her relationship with her own house deepens the sense of violation. Her home serves as an extension of herself. It’s not just a physical space but a repository of her past, her actions, and her identity. Her husband’s grave in the backyard stands as a stark reminder of her past actions, making the house a silent witness to her life’s narrative. She has long worried that “someone else would move in and find [her] past mistakes buried in the garden” (298). She recognizes her vulnerability, which is underscored by her cancer diagnosis and impending death.
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