A Simple Favor

Emily represents a type of mother Stephanie admires; Emily is beautiful and elegant, and she works full-time in addition to being a good mother. Her house impresses Stephanie with its sophistication, as does her job in Manhattan with famous fashion designer, Dennis Nylon. As Stephanie notes, she and Emily become friends because they are a bit older than the other mothers; however, as it turns out, Emily has chosen Stephanie as a friend to serve as a pawn in her insurance fraud scheme.

Emily, like a femme fatale in noir films, is controlling and manipulative, illustrated by her relationships with everyone she claims to love. She is blunt about this part of her nature, noting “controlling information is what I do, what I did, for a living” (158). By stealing Sean’s mother’s ring, she forces him to choose her over his own mother and when he does, comments, “I had him. He was mine” (165). Although she appears to care deeply for her sister, Eve, no one knows she has a twin, and she uses Eve’s drug use to drive her to death by suicide.

Like Stephanie, Emily also likes danger and risk and feels The Allure of What’s Forbidden. At the end of the novel, she takes this to its farthest point when she murders Mr. Prager, and Stephanie notes how the act, and describing her plan, excites Emily: “If I saw her from a distance and didn’t know what she was talking about, I’d think, What a happy woman!” (289) She can also be vengeful, and although by the end of the novel, she has gotten everything she wanted, Sean still believes “most likely, she wasn’t done with me” (318). Emily proves Sean’s suspicions right at the end of the novel when she points suspicion at Stephanie and Sean, and yet even when she fears that the police may be onto her, true to character, she is still excited.

Sean is Emily’s husband, originally from England but working on Wall Street in Manhattan. At the beginning of the novel, Stephanie doesn’t know him well—all the information she gets about him comes from Emily, who tells her that she and Nicky are “lucky if Sean ever gets home in time for dinner” (10). Emily complains about him, and as a result, Stephanie doesn’t like him at the beginning of the novel. In their first interaction, when she calls him in London to tell him about Emily’s disappearance, he doesn’t ask about Nicky, which seems to confirm her bad opinion of him. However, as the story continues, Stephanie’s opinion of Sean, and thus her portrayal of him in her blog, shifts.

Sean is attracted to Emily because she is dangerous, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that he isn’t much of a risk taker himself. Instead, Sean falls in with the plans of others, first Emily, and then Stephanie, regardless of his own misgivings. In the case of the insurance fraud, he goes along with Emily’s plan because he doesn’t think it will ever happen. After Emily disappears and Stephanie becomes more a part of his life, he falls into a relationship with her as well. His ambivalence to Stephanie is clear in the chapters that offer his perspective, as when he says, after their break-up, “I didn’t mind not having Stephanie around force-feeding me and Nicky her nourishing meals” (303). Yet no trace of this dissatisfaction appears in earlier scenes between them, showing that Sean is Living a Double Life just as much as Emily and Stephanie are.

At the end of the novel, Sean accepts that Emily got the better of him, displaying passivity once again by leaving the country and giving up custody of Nicky. Further, he knows that Emily will seek further revenge and believes that the only thing to do is “hold [his] breath and wait” (318). Throughout the novel, he is passively complicit with both Emily and Stephanie’s plans and remains so until the end.

Nicky is Emily and Sean’s son. He is five years old, and his friendship with Miles facilitates the friendship between Emily and Stephanie. Like Miles, he is born in April, which according to Stephanie, makes them “a little older than the other kids in their class” and therefore “more mature” (6). She also sees Nicky in the same terms that she describes Miles: “Decent, honest, kind little people, qualities that […] are not as common in boys” (6). In fact, Stephanie doesn’t seem to distinguish Nicky as very different or individual from her own son, even though throughout the novel, Nicky shows that he has his own mind.

After Emily’s disappearance, Nicky turns his anger on Stephanie. Stephanie, however, pretends not to understand that Nicky is aware of the development of her relationship with Sean. However, it is clear from her descriptions of Nicky’s behavior that he feels she is encroaching on his mother’s life—her husband, child, and house—and resents her for it. Nicky is also the first person that Emily contacts after faking her death—she doesn’t care about maintaining her marriage, but it is crucial to her that she and Nicky are together at the end. As Emily’s plan shifts, her goal changes from relocating her family overseas to ousting Sean from the family and gaining full custody of Nicky.