The Housemaid's Secret

Despite the fact that Millie is depicted as caring and heroic, she is often also naïve and somewhat helpless. Although Millie insists she can take care of herself and will never turn to Enzo for help, she calls him when she realizes that Wendy set her up. Millie has never stopped caring for Enzo and is quick to seek out his help. Millie’s feelings are further confirmed when she spends the night with Enzo less than 12 hours after her break up with Brock. Additionally, had Millie been more curious about the relationship between Wendy and who she thought was Douglas, she might have learned the truth long before the real Douglas died and avoided her current trouble. In this way, McFadden joins the themes of the Bystander Effect Versus the Everyday Hero and Using Domestic Violence to Manipulate Others. Millie’s investment in Wendy’s circumstances tows the line between being a bystander who chooses to not intervene in something that is not their business and being a hero who never thinks to question someone in need. For Millie, who has lots of experience with women survivors of domestic violence, the act of questioning what appears to be domestic violence contributes to that violence. Yet, in not questioning the appearance, Millie’s heroic impulses are quickly turned into qualities ripe for exploitation. As Enzo and Millie learn Russell’s name and learn about the cabin he owns, readers are prompted to recall the cabin from the novel’s Prologue and worry over the inevitable threat to Millie’s life, which she seems now unlikely to prevent or save herself from.

Enzo’s morality and rational mind are similarly complicated as Millie’s. Enzo is able to save women from their abusive partners, using his connections with an underground world to provide these women with fake identification; he is also able to orchestrate Xavier’s arrest by planting drugs on him. But he is steadfast against letting Millie kill Wendy, and in this way Enzo and Millie mirror Millie and Wendy from earlier in the novel when Wendy contemplates killing Douglas with Millie. Thus, Millie’s desire to kill Wendy out of revenge comes across as another example of her impulsive rather than purely heroic character. She may be willing to risk her life to help a woman in need, but she is also ready to risk another stint in prison in order to avenge herself.

At this point, the novel shifts from being a mystery with a heroic protagonist to a tale of revenge with Millie as vigilante. The evidence against Millie continues to grow as the police find gunshot residue on her clothing from the night of the shooting, and the anticipation over how Millie will earn her good name back grows urgent. Readers are already aware of Millie’s potential for violence, as evidenced by her prison record and her injuring of Xavier in self-defense, so when Millie walks out of Enzo’s apartment with his car keys, the assumption is that she plans to go after Wendy even though she promises Enzo she is going home to turn herself in. While Millie is not explicitly motivated in these chapters by wealth, she is motivated by a desire to control her circumstances in a way that can be compared to Wendy’s desire to control her circumstances. In this way, Wealth as a Motivator can be understood metaphorically as the desire to preserve one’s pride.