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“As she gulps it down she looks out of the vast glass windows running along the back of the new, alien home. Only black out there. Nothing to see. She hasn’t got round to blinds yet. She is exposed. Looked at. They can see her, but she can’t see them.”

Catherine’s new house is a metaphor for her feelings of exposure. Before this moment, Catherine recognized herself in the book written about an incident she has been keeping secret. Catherine feels like she and her secret are on display, just like how she is illuminated in her house in the nighttime, but she can’t see who is looking at her or who is trying to expose her secret.

“You see, I’d always enjoyed reading far more than writing. To be writer, to be a good writer, you need courage. You need to be prepared to expose yourself. You must be brave, but I have always been a coward. Nancy was the brave one.”

One of Stephen’s key character traits is his timidity. Here he explains how his wife Nancy was a better writer because she had the courage to express herself in her work, whereas Stephen’s fears stunted his. The Perfect Stranger, the book Stephen publishes about Catherine, was mostly written by Nancy, and he feels like her words helped him overcome his passivity to seek justice for Jonathan.

“It was the beginning of her digging a tunnel to escape from herself, but from Nicholas too. Her son was a constant reminder, but she couldn’t tell Robert that. She couldn’t say that being on her own with Nicholas was sending her mad, that his presence threw up memories she wanted to wipe out.”

When Catherine returned from her vacation in Spain after being sexually assaulted, her relationship with her son became strained due to the bad memories Catherine was trying to conceal. Catherine and Nicholas’s relationship continues to be distant as neither one feels comfortable being emotionally open. Catherine’s secret therefore isolates her from her family and forces her to shoulder the emotional burden of her assault by herself, revealing