63 pages • 2 hours read
Elin HilderbrandThe Perfect Couple
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 27-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary: “Saturday, July 7, 2018, 5:15 p.m.”
In her interrogation, Featherleigh tells Nick she found Merritt crying in the rose garden at Summerland while the rest of the young people were out in town. Trying to comfort the young woman, Featherleigh took Merritt along in the search for some alcohol. Featherleigh found a bottle under a tent on the beach and settled in with Merritt. Though Merritt did not drink as her stomach was upset, the two women confided their affairs to each other. Featherleigh does not know the identity of the married man with whom Merritt was in love. Soon, she and Merritt ran into Tag and Thomas on the beach, and they all ended up partying together. Featherleigh corroborates Tag’s story about her bringing Merritt water, which Merritt gulped down. After Thomas was called up by Abby, Featherleigh left Summerland; she did not want to be around Tag, fearing Greer’s wrath. Greer disapproves of Featherleigh and is also a chronic liar. Featherleigh feels that novelists are habitual liars as they forget the line between real life and fiction. Nick is intrigued by her comment.
Nick believes most of Featherleigh’s story with the exception of her time of departure from Summerland. Featherleigh claims she left the beach around one o’clock in the morning, but the manager of her inn says she didn’t arrive back until 5:30 am. Featherleigh confesses to Nick that she has been lying. She did not call the taxi at one o’clock in the morning, but instead went inside the house. She had meant to wait up for Thomas, with whom she is in love, but fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, which was around five o’clock in the morning, she took a taxi back to her inn. Thomas is the married man with whom Featherleigh had an affair. Thomas broke off the relationship after Abby got pregnant. He had asked Featherleigh not to attend Benji’s wedding, threatening to kill her if she did. Nick senses a connection between the missing water glass, Merritt’s death, and Featherleigh’s deep sleep.
Celeste returns to Summerland from the hospital. She meets her parents and tells them Merritt’s death is her fault. Last night, when she found Merritt weeping in the rose garden, she should have told her friend that love is difficult for everyone, even herself, given that she is not in love with Benji. Instead, Celeste simply hugged Merritt and asked her to move on. Celeste tells her mother that she wants to take a trip by herself to sort things out. Karen has the epiphany that she cannot give up on life until life really ends; she needs to live every moment for Celeste, and even for Bruce.
Chief Kapenash is about to call Thomas for questioning when Greer asks him to accompany her to the living room. Greer tells Chief Kapenash she forgot to mention an important detail to Nick. She had told Nick she drank champagne to fall asleep the previous night, but left out that she also wanted to consume sleeping pills. She brought her pill box for this reason to the kitchen, but decided against the pills as they are quite strong. Greer left the pillbox downstairs and cannot find it now. She remembers offering the pills from the box to Merritt when the young woman stayed with them in June, as Merritt had trouble sleeping. Greer suggests that Merritt found her pill box in the kitchen last night, took the pills, went swimming, and drowned. Chief Kapenash does not believe Greer’s story or hypothesis.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Tuesday, July 3-Friday, July 6, 2018”
Days before the wedding, Celeste makes a pros and cons list of marrying Benji. The biggest con is that she does not love him. The pros are financial security and, above all, Nantucket, a place with which Celeste has fallen in love. Through Benji, Celeste can seek Nantucket’s romantic charm, its beaches, its heirloom vegetables and tastings, and art and culture. Benji’s wealth is an enticement, yet Celeste also finds herself bristling against Benji’s sometimes cruel insinuations. Benji suggests, for instance, that her $62,000 yearly salary is akin to pocket money and that her retail-store candles are not worth taking to the Brownstone the Winburys are planning to buy Celeste and Benji. Three of Celeste’s coworkers—Bethany, Mawabe, and Vern—plan to attend the wedding, arriving in Nantucket on the wedding day itself. Benji feels amused at the idea of Mawabe and Greer being in the same room, which exacerbates Celeste’s panic about how different her world is from Benji’s.
Celeste’s stutter intensifies close to the wedding, so she whittles her wedding vows down to just two words: “I do” (303). Merritt helps Celeste practice the phrase. Merritt also tells her Tag has ended their affair. Once on Nantucket on Thursday, July 5, Celeste gets swamped by the directives of Greer and Roger Pelton, the wedding planner. Celeste always keeps an eye on Shooter. However, when she sees Karen and Bruce enjoying themselves, she makes a deal with God to go through the wedding if God will keep Karen alive. The night of the rehearsal dinner, Benji suggests going to town. Celeste goes to fetch Merritt, but Merritt declines as her stomach is upset. Celeste comforts Merritt, who is weeping, and promises Merritt she will never have to see Tag again after the wedding.
In town, Celeste and Shooter go for pizza as the others wait in line to get into a club. However, instead of the pizza joint, Shooter leads Celeste to the dock. He hugs Celeste and asks her to elope with him. He wants Celeste to meet him at the dock at 6:15 am the next morning so they can leave the island together. They can then go to Vegas and get married immediately. If Celeste does not meet Shooter, though, he’ll understand she has chosen Benji. Shooter will return to the house and participate in the wedding. Celeste reflects on her warm childhood with her parents and their happy marriage. Deciding nothing can replace love, she says yes to Shooter.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Saturday, July 7, 2018, 5:45 p.m.”
Chief Kapenash confronts Thomas with Featherleigh’s testimony of their affair. Thomas denies the testimony at first, claiming Featherleigh, who is a dealer of fake antiques, is a proven liar and charlatan. However, when Chief Kapenash presses him, Thomas admits he has been seeing Featherleigh for several years. He wanted to break up with her after he met Abby, but Featherleigh kept pursuing him, and he would relent every time. When Thomas tried to definitively end the affair after learning Abby was pregnant, Featherleigh began to blackmail him: If Thomas stopped seeing her, she would tell Abby everything. Thomas begged and even threatened Featherleigh not to come to the wedding.
Chief Kapenash asks Thomas about Greer’s pillbox. Thomas says the pillbox was a family joke, since Greer never let her family touch it, the pills being too strong. Chief Kapenash thinks it’s therefore unlikely Greer would offer such strong medication to Merritt, who was just a houseguest. Chief Kapenash wants to know if Thomas took some of the pills and mixed them in Featherleigh’s water to kill her. Thomas flatly denies the charge.
An exhausted Chief visits his home and meets his niece, Chloe. Chloe tells Chief Kapenash about witnessing the argument between Tag and Merritt. There is something else as well. Chloe tripped on the way to the beach and dropped all the champagne glasses she was carrying. Merritt helped her clean up the mess. Chief Kapenash imagines Merritt may have cut her foot on the glass shards, being drunk, but Chloe insists that Merritt was sober. Chief Kapenash asks Chloe to make wise choices in her life, unlike Merritt. Chloe says the scariest part about Merritt’s death is that just days before she had posted a happy picture with Celeste on Instagram. Life can be extremely fickle.
Later, Chief Kapenash and Nick have dinner at the station and discuss all the possible scenarios of Merritt’s death. The detectives believe it is possible either Tag or Greer mixed pills in the water to drug Merritt. The missing water glass points to something sinister, but the cops do not have enough evidence to charge anyone. Chief Kapenash thinks Merritt may have cut her foot on the glass shards, gone to the water to rinse out the blood, and drowned because she was drugged.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Saturday, July 7, 2018, 6:55 p.m.”
The Nantucket Sound runs the story that Merritt’s death was an accidental drowning. Benji meets Celeste and asks if she will ever marry him. When Celeste refuses, Benji thinks it is because of his father’s involvement with Merritt. Benji wants to tell Celeste he’s nothing like his family, but realizes this is untrue. Everything he has is because of the privilege his family has given him. He cannot now abandon his family for convenience. Celeste tells Benji that her decision to cancel the wedding has nothing to do with his family; she does not want to marry him because of her own feelings. Benji is devastated. He discusses Celeste’s refusal with Shooter, whom he meets for the first time since last night. Shooter wrestles with whether to tell Benji the truth about him and Celeste, but refrains. Now that he has seen Benji so grief-struck, Shooter realizes his plan to elope with celeste was cowardly. Shooter remembers every kindness Benji has done him, including standing by Shooter when Shooter’s mother died of a drug overdose. Shooter decides to stick by Benji and give Celeste time to find her way to him. Until then, Shooter will hold onto a photo someone took of him and Celeste on the docks on the night before Merritt’s death. Someone has texted him the photo from a Manhattan number. In the picture, Shooter is looking at Celeste with an expression filled with longing.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Saturday, July 7, 2018, 8:00 p.m.”
Elida, the housekeeper who works for the Winburys, tells Greer she found her missing pillbox in the trash in Thomas’s room. Greer goes to Thomas’s room to question her older son and hears him and Abby arguing. Abby has always known about Thomas’s affair with Featherleigh and does not believe Thomas ever broke the relationship off. Abby accuses Thomas of planning to have a romantic interlude with Featherleigh the previous night. Abby had heard Featherleigh singing in the kitchen.
Greer pieces together the truth about Merritt’s death. Abby, who came to the kitchen to get water, had heard Featherleigh in the house. She spotted Greer’s pillbox, mixed some pills in Featherleigh’s water glass, and hid the case. But the glass somehow went to Merritt instead of Featherleigh. Drugged without her knowledge, Merritt indeed drowned by accident. Greer resolves to take this knowledge to her grave to save her family.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Saturday, July 8, 2018, 2:47 a.m.”
After Tag and Merritt return to shore, Tag is both annoyed with Merritt and filled with tenderness for her. He decides to reason with her after the wedding weekend and goes off to the house. Merritt thinks Tag is a coward for running away from her. She had believed he was enchanted with her, but he betrayed her. Merritt had wanted a love as strong with Tag as Benji and Celeste seem to have for each other. But that dream is over. Merritt will now be a single mother, raising her baby by herself. In anger, Merritt throws the ring Tag gave her into the water and heads to the guest cottage where she is staying. On the way, she cuts her foot on a shard from the glasses Chloe dropped. Though she is dead-tired and sleepy, she goes back ashore to wash the blood off her foot. She glimpses the ring on the shallow ocean floor and decides to retrieve it after all, so she can keep it as a memento for her child. As she dives for the ring, she falls asleep underwater.
Chapters 27-32 Analysis
The final section solves the mystery of Merritt’s death, yet a few threads remain open at the end of the novel. For instance, while it can be inferred Abby did intend to drug Featherleigh so she would not sleep with Thomas, it is unclear how the glass of spiked water reached Merritt. What happened to the glass is even more unclear, and the vital object remains missing when the novel ends. Further, Chief Kapenash and Nick never suspect Abby’s involvement in Merritt’s death; it is Greer who puts the pieces together. The motif of unanswered questions and limited perspectives highlights that sometimes there are no definitive answers in life. Further, the complete truth can never be known by one person. The series of coincidences, starting with Greer accidentally leaving her pillbox in the kitchen, also illustrate the vulnerability of people striving to maintain appearances at all times. Random happenstance in life can be deadly, sometimes literally. Another mystery left unsolved is that of the person who photographed Celeste and Shooter at the dock and sent the photo to Shooter. The open thread is possibly linked to Hilderbrand’s larger Nantucket universe, to be pursued in another novel.
The final chapter begins with the line, “Nantucket Island holds her people’s secrets” (340), reintroducing the motif of the closed world of Nantucket. The dark side of this closed world is that it works hard to preserve the status quo and maintain appearances, tying into the themes of The Dichotomy Between Public and Private Personas and The Illusion of the Perfect Family. The discovery of the pillbox in Abby and Thomas’s room is concealed by Greer, and Merritt’s threat to the world of appearances is eliminated. The final chapter, told largely from Merritt’s perspective, is also a bleakly ironic commentary on the way the closed circle of wealth and privilege operates, tying into the theme of The Privilege and Limitations of Wealth and Status. So powerful are these forces of wealth and privilege that both nature and coincidence seem to conspire with them. Merritt, the outsider and the threat, dies conveniently; as a result, the Winburys can maintain their illusions. The last chapter highlights the key symbol of Merritt’s ring. The ring, while simultaneously still acting as a symbol of status and luxury, now also represents Tag’s betrayal as well as Merritt’s doomed love for him. An important aspect of Merritt’s perspective is her belief that Benji and Celeste make “the perfect couple” (340). Eager for love and acceptance, Merritt had imagined she and Tag would be akin to Celeste and Benji. However, the reader knows the perfection of Benji and Celeste’s love is also a lie. Earlier, Celeste tells her parents she should have told Merritt as much. Merritt’s desperation and Celeste’s denial of her own truth show how social pressures to find the perfect partner and be coupled can be harmful.
Tellingly, Celeste’s stutter resolves once she decides to cancel her wedding to Benji, as Benji bitterly notes to Shooter. The disappearance of the stutter marks a coming of age for Celeste’s character. Realizing that she cannot settle for stability and wealth, Celeste overcomes the temptation for the good life. When Karen remarks with wonder that Summerland is endlessly beautiful on the Otises’ last day in the house, Celeste dryly notes, “[w]ell” (290), leading Karen to wonder “if she’s agreeing or disagreeing” (290). Several characters have a turnaround in this section, including Karen. Karen flushes the anesthetic pills down the toilet, feeling she still has plenty to live for. Shooter decides against telling Benji about his relationship with Celeste. Until this point, Shooter has been a slippery character for the reader to pinpoint, an effect enhanced by the narrative associating Shooter with frequently running away. While Celeste is drawn irresistibly to Shooter, Shooter’s callous approach to his best friend Benji’s relationship does not paint him in a particularly flattering light. But when Shooter sees Benji heartbroken, he “hugs him tight” and “absorbs the shudders of Benji’s sobs […] He says nothing” (333). By nature an impatient person, Shooter also uncharacteristically decides to wait for Celeste rather than pursue her actively. Benji’s growth involves a return to the status quo, albeit now with the acceptance of his privilege. Despite his anger at his father’s actions, Benji cannot disown him. Like his mother, Benji now more fully grasps the privilege the Winbury name represents, and moreover, he is prepared to prioritize it over his private life.
Chloe’s observation that Merritt looks happy in the Instagram picture she posted on the day that she and Celeste left for Nantucket is tied into the theme of The Dichotomy Between Public and Private Personas. Chloe thinks the picture shows how quickly life can change for the worse. However, Chief Kapenash notes that Merritt is looking happier by far than Celeste in the exuberantly hashtagged photo. The reality is Merritt must have been nervous and terrified as she headed into the wedding weekend, yet the desire to keep up appearances had her acting. The text suggests that perhaps the pressure to keep up appearances also contributed to Merritt’s emotional state and sometimes poor choices.
By the end of the novel, Greer, the upholder of the status quo, emerges strong once again. Despite Tag’s infidelity and Thomas’s mirroring of his father’s behavior, the crisis around the Winbury family has passed. The secret of Abby’s indirect role in Merritt’s death “resides with Greer, and with Greer it will remain until her death” (338). That the Winburys escape relatively unharmed from the scandal of the cancelled wedding and the death of Merritt shows the way power operates in the real world.
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By Elin Hilderbrand
