58 pages • 1 hour read
Ruth WareThe Lying Game
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A 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 23-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Rule Three: Don’t Get Caught”
Chapter 23 Summary
This chapter begins the section “Rule Three: Don’t Get Caught.” Circumstance forces Isa and Thea to take the village bus back to Salten. Thea sits with shy, acne-ridden Mark Wren. Another girl wonders why Isa spends so much time at Kate’s. Isa thinks of Luc but lies and says Thea has a crush on Mark Wren, adding that they fooled around on the bus. Isa realizes she broke one of their game rules but thinks she cannot take the lie back. Later, Isa finds graffiti in the women’s restroom of the pub, calling Mark Wren a sex offender who “fingers Salten House girls” (118). Isa worries about the harm her lie caused. Mary Wren confronts Isa in front of the crowd, telling her that if she spreads more lies about Mark, Mary will “break every bone” (119) in Isa’s body.
Chapter 24 Summary
Isa angrily asks Kate what made Luc change. Ambrose and Luc’s mother, Mireille, were together when Kate and Luc were young. When they parted, Mireille went back to France and became a junkie and unfit mother. Ambrose took teenage Luc and made him part of the family. When Ambrose disappeared, Luc was 15, and Kate nearly 16. Kate could not care for Luc or be his guardian: Luc returned to France against his will. Years later, Luc returned and became a gardener at Salten House. Luc cannot forgive Kate for returning him to France. There, he suffered abuse as a child by his mother’s boyfriends, and when he returned at 15, he suffered further abuse by a man at the children’s home. Kate tearfully declares, “I did what I had to do!” (124).
Chapter 25 Summary
Isa believes she should have recognized that Luc suffered from abuse. She knows local boys used to tease Luc, who endured their mockery until a whispered comment made him snap and violently beat up another boy. Ambrose talked with Luc, but Luc trashed his room in a rage. Now, Luc’s anger in the post office shakes Isa because Luc used to treat them all gently. Isa recalls lying in the sun on the jetty next to Luc and longing for him to reach out and touch her. Instead, Isa kissed Luc on the lips. Startled and angry, Luc pushed Isa away, telling her not to touch him. Isa did not understand his reaction. Now, Isa feels sad for Luc, but fears his potential for violence. She wonders if he killed the sheep.
Chapter 26 Summary
Fatima wants to go home but Isa believes they need to stick to their “script” (131), and people will talk if they leave now. Fatima suggests that the sheep’s wounds did not look like dog attack trauma. Isa tells her about the note rather than lie by omission. Isa knows that someone is trying to punish them. Shaken, Fatima asks Kate about the note, and what Luc knows. Kate argues that the note changes nothing: No one has gone to the police yet. The best thing to do is attend the dinner, or people will wonder why they came to Salten. Isa agrees, but gets upset when she realizes she will have to leave Freya with a babysitter.
Chapter 27 Summary
The night of the dinner, Isa anxiously gives Freya to Liz, the sitter. Isa feels tremendous love for her friends and sees the girls they were in the women they are now. The women walk across the marsh. Kate wants to take a shortcut through a thorny gap, but the others disagree. Kate is upset. They continue walking and see crime scene tape and a white forensics tent on the beach and understand why Kate did not want to go that direction. Fatima insists that Kate is not the only one who cares, that each one of them has dropped everything in their lives and come to Salten because they love Kate. They pledge to form a united front at the dinner.
Chapter 28 Summary
The four women reminisce about their school days as they walk to Salten House. Isa remembers other unpleasant memories, like Mark Wren’s constant teasing, and how other girls feared and avoided them. Isa and her friends put up walls against the other girls and potentially created enemies. Jess Hamilton, a girl from the same year as the friends, approaches them excitedly and makes small talk, but Fatima and Isa feel awkward talking about their families. Another woman recognizes Jess, who introduces the four friends. The woman loses her polite smile and acknowledges them coolly before taking Jess away.
Chapter 29 Summary
Isa feels overwhelmed that everyone knows the rumors about her and her friends. The memories returning to Isa are cruel. Isa recalls intimidating a young first year girl, threatening to make her “life a misery” (152) if the girl ratted her out. Isa also remembers the day Salten expelled them. At the dinner table, Isa admits to another woman, Lucy, that she was the object of one of the girls’ lies. Embarrassed, Lucy stops speaking to Isa. Jess Hamilton corners Isa as she is leaving and asks if the rumors are true that Ambrose drew naked pictures of them, and that when the school found out, he committed suicide. Isa feels as if Jess struck her.
Chapter 30 Summary
Miss Weatherby stops Isa before she can leave and apologizes for the way the school handled things in the past. She invites Isa to send Freya to Salten House when she is old enough. Isa and Fatima catch up to the others and find Kate holding Thea’s hair back as she vomits. Fatima is upset that Thea did not eat anything at the dinner. Thea declares she is fine, but Fatima argues that she needs food, and needs to stop drinking so much. Thea retorts that Fatima is “using that head scarf as a bandage” (168) and tells her to stop criticizing other people’s coping mechanisms. Fatima insists that she cares about Thea.
Chapter 31 Summary
Isa hears Freya’s screams coming across the marsh. Luc is on the beach, holding Freya. Isa snatches Freya from his arms and accuses Luc of kidnapping her. Luc explains that he came to apologize for being so hostile at the post office, and he tried to help the babysitter by taking Freya for a walk to calm her down. Luc says the women have not changed; they come running whenever Kate calls. Luc is drunk. He begins shouting about Ambrose, saying that those responsible for the body in the Reach are right in front of him. Kate tells Luc to leave and stay away from her friends; she doesn’t want to see him again. Isa senses the hatred between them.
Chapter 32 Summary
Isa remembers the first time Kate messaged the girls “I need you.” They hurry to Tide Mill and find Ambrose dead. Kate came home from school for the weekend and found him in his chair on the jetty holding a bottle of wine and a suicide note. Thea notices an old biscuit tin with a broken lock, filled with medical equipment. Kate explains that Ambrose was a heroin addict but got clean when she was a baby. He kept the heroin as a daily reminder to choose sobriety. Kate wants the girls to say nothing. With Ambrose gone, child services will take Kate and she will lose everything. The others protest, but eventually agree. They secretly bury Ambrose, taking turns digging a hole on the beach. Isa still hears the sounds of his body sliding into the hole and the “slap” of the wet sand as they filled it in (183).
Chapters 23-32 Analysis
Ware finally reveals the central conflict in this section: The women concealed Ambrose’s body after he apparently committed suicide, and Kate waited to report his disappearance. A new conflict, however, dominates and threatens the women’s secret: the fact that someone knows what they did. In Isa’s mind, Luc seems the primary suspect. Isa claims that Luc’s anger unsettles her because he directs it at the four women, but it might also unsettle her that Luc still does not fancy her.
Isa has not been honest with her friends—in the past or present. Her self-serving lie about Mark Wren compromised Thea and hurt Mark, just so Isa could protect herself from admitting she liked Luc. Her teenage desire for Luc was powerful, but Luc did not reciprocate. Isa recounts that Luc reacted as if she had “ambushed” him when she kissed him while he was sleeping (130). She did; and suffered his rejection. When Luc insists that both Kate and Isa knew what he was going back to (109), Ware plants doubt about Isa’s ignorance concerning his return. Isa neatly sets Luc up as the likely suspect for leaving the gutted sheep.
Isa’s psychological state grows more brittle as her feelings of guilt continue to surface. She experiences moments of rage when she thinks that someone might hurt her friends (139). She drinks too much at the alumnae dinner and displays paranoid behavior, sensing a “wariness” behind people’s smiles—though she admits she may be “imagining” it (152). She believes that others are whispering about her. Because of the mental image she’s created of Luc as a villain, Isa overreacts when he tries to help with Freya. These reactions are unhealthy manifestations of Isa’s guilt, a major theme of The Lying Game. Isa’s behavior also suggests a lack of unique self-identity. She feels that the four women are so bound together by the past and their secret, she thinks that she “can’t tell where I end and the others begin” (144).
Ware continues to use elements of the setting to create a menacing atmosphere. In these chapters, different qualities of light reveal Isa’s different moods. The light on the Reach, and at Salten House, is uncompromising and blinding, symbolically exposing the women’s lies. This idea comes up later, when Miss Weatherby confronts the girls with the illustrations and contraband; the light is “cruelly bright” (185). In contrast, the light in Isa’s London flat is “dusty yellow sunshine” (81): Isa’s life and lies in London are thus far unexposed. The light of dawn, moonlight, and evening twilight are softer, and allow Isa’s happier memories and the ghosts of their former selves to manifest (139).
In this section, the conflict between “town” and “gown” (107) becomes clear. Mary Wren represents the “town” contingent. The Salten townspeople come from a lower socioeconomic class and struggle financially. Mary senses the girls’ superiority to her and the villagers. The Salten girls represent the “gown,” the wealthy upper-class that attends the expensive boarding school. There is a division between the two factions that only Ambrose successfully bridged. The town resents the gown. The graffiti disrespecting Mark Wren suggests that the town girls feel he crossed a line, violating an accepted social more by sitting with snooty Thea. Similarly, by staying in Salten and rejecting the friendship of others at Salten House, the four friends alienate themselves from their peer group. The four girls draw the censure of both town and gown.
Young Isa experiences the criticism of the villagers in the pub when Mary Wren confronts her about spreading rumors. Present-day Isa realizes that their former classmates still hold their old game against them. Because of the friends’ cliquish behavior, Isa feels that the tables are now turned. Now they are the object of everyone else’s gossip. The adversarial nature of the four girls versus “everyone else” (116) is another central theme in The Lying Game; and the cost of such a tight-knit friendship.
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By Ruth Ware
