The Short Answer
Today it’s All Her Fault ending explained, and fair warning, this video spoils everything in Andrea Mara’s thriller. If you haven’t read it yet, come back after.
So, how does All Her Fault end? Milo is found alive, but the nanny who took him is not the villain she first seems. Milo is her real son. His father, Peter Irvine, swapped two babies after a car crash four years earlier, and then killed to keep it secret. Marissa works it out from a single nickname.
Content note: this video discusses the death of a baby, a child abduction and murder.
The Fake Playdate
It starts on a Friday in November, at a front door that isn’t the right front door. Marissa Irvine arrives at fourteen Tudor Grove to collect her four year old son, Milo, from a playdate. The woman who answers is a stranger called Esther, and she has never heard of him.
The text that arranged it was signed Jenny, and that number is now out of service. The real Jenny, Jenny Kennedy, is in Paris for work, and her son Jacob is at another classmate’s house.
So where is Milo? His teacher says Milo put up his hand at pick up, as the school rule demands, and went off with a childminder with long red hair and a check shirt. That minder is Jacob’s live in nanny, Carrie Finch.
Seven Days
Then the days begin to count. On Tuesday, day four, Milo’s green raincoat with silver dinosaurs turns up on the rocks at Killiney Hill. A witness says they saw a man throw something from the Obelisk, and the police think it was staged to make everyone fear the worst.
On Wednesday, the Irvines’ own au pair, Ana, admits that Carrie had been chatting at the playground since mid September, quizzing her about the house, the cars and the family. Carrie’s whole life story was false, from the dead parents to the brothers.
On Friday, day seven, Milo is found asleep in a locked car in Sandymount, his hair dyed brown. He is safe. Carrie is nowhere.
Milo thinks his mother is dead, because Carrie told him she had gone away. He describes a small house, a red brick bungalow with a white door and one grey step, and he can hear a school yard through the window. That is how the police later find the house.
Who Was Carrie
Carrie Finch doesn’t exist. She was born Caroline Murphy, the daughter of Irene and a career criminal called Rob Murphy, who ran when Irene told him she was pregnant. Caroline left home at sixteen.
She built Carrie from scratch, the shy girl from a Wicklow house with horses, to get hired by the Kennedys. Elsewhere she was Lena, a glossy girlfriend for Marissa’s business partner, Colin Dobson, who bragged to her about the house and the money.
There was also Kyle Byrde, her old boyfriend from the estate, who went to prison and was living as Danny Vaughan when he was killed. Jacob had chalked that name on his playroom wall, spelled the way a child would. That’s how Jenny recognised it.
Carrie didn’t do this alone, and that is the question hanging over the middle of the book. Who was the masked man with the monster voice that Milo heard in the night? The book gives us a line up of suspects, and almost every one of them turns out to be hiding something small and sad, rather than a kidnap.
Whose Baby
Here is the twist. On Friday night, a week after Milo vanished, Marissa asks her husband one question about a nickname, and Peter finally talks.
Four years earlier, just after Milo was born, Marissa and Peter were driving to a check up on an icy road when they crashed into a car driven by a young woman, Carrie. Marissa was knocked out. Peter found their baby son dead. Then he heard the other baby crying.
He took Carrie’s baby out of the wreck, put his own dead son into the car seat, and pushed it back. When the ambulance came, he was holding the living baby, and the paramedics assumed that baby was his. Carrie woke in hospital to be told her child had died.
The Cover Up
Peter then told Carrie, in her hospital bed, that they wouldn’t prosecute, and slipped her an envelope of money to start again somewhere else. The inquest later recorded an open verdict, not blame.
Marissa never knew. She had always understood that it was the other driver’s baby who was lost.
Years later, Peter met Carrie by chance at a playground in Dun Laoghaire. Milo was telling his father about the colours of the days of the week. Carrie answered him back, and when she saw his crooked smile and his dimpled chin, she knew who he was. Peter slammed her head against a ticket machine and warned her away.
The Clues
So how does Marissa work it out? She has been looking in the wrong direction all week, at Colin, at her brother in law Brian, even at Jenny. Then Milo says one sentence.
First, the nickname. Milo says the masked man who left him in the car told him, don’t cry, Milo-Mouse. Only one person calls him that.
Second, the man made Milo repeat his name and address, so that if someone found him, he would get home.
Third, the colour clue. Milo sees days and letters in colour, and Carrie told him she did too, which means he inherited it.
Last, the paper trail. Peter had found a forged reference behind the printer at Marissa’s office, listing the Sandymount address, and he never told the police.
What Peter Did
Peter went to the bungalow alone that night, while Marissa slept after her tablet. He says he found a gun under Carrie’s pillow, and that he had to end it. He smothered Carrie in her bed. He carried Milo out to a car and left him there. He told Marissa nothing, and he told the police nothing. Even then, when Milo was safe, he kept quiet, because the first question would have been how he knew where to look.
Then Carrie’s father, Rob, rang Peter, thinking he’d killed his daughter, and demanded money. Peter had also made Colin confess that he was stealing from client estates, three hundred and sixty thousand euro from the Fenelon estate and two hundred thousand from the Downey estate. So he sent Colin with a bag of cash to an industrial estate and watched.
Rob shot Colin. Peter then shot Rob with the gun from Carrie’s house, wiped it, and left it by Colin’s body. The police believe the two men shot each other. Kyle Byrde, they think, was killed earlier by Rob.
Marissa’s Choice
This is the moment the book has been building to. Marissa is a solicitor. She believes in the law, and she knows what it means if she goes to the guards. Milo is the child she raised and loves, and he is also another woman’s son.
Marissa tells Peter to leave. He refuses. If she goes to the police, he says, they’ll take Milo away, and he can handle prison better than she can handle losing her son.
She calls Detective Sergeant McConville anyway, on speaker. But she asks only about Kyle Byrde’s killer, while Peter smiles and raises a glass of wine. She says it feels good to know it’s over. The next morning, she nods through McConville’s visit.
She keeps the secret for Milo. It is a quiet, terrible decision, made in a living room with a glass of wine going warm. And Milo has already started shying away from his father.
The Last Page
The book ends with a newspaper report. Peter Irvine has died on holiday in Marbella after going into anaphylactic shock from shellfish. Marissa couldn’t find his EpiPen, and she had bought a stock cube that contained traces of shellfish. Milo is at home with his nanny.
Early on, we’re told that Peter is allergic to shellfish and nothing with shellfish is allowed in the house. The family has an apartment in Marbella. The book never says what Marissa did. I read it as her answer to Peter’s threat.
The Loose Ends
A few other threads close quietly. Brian’s secret was only an affair with a woman who works at an estate agents, and her key to show houses is why Jenny saw him let himself into one. Colin’s long list of lies had nothing to do with the kidnap at all.
Carrie’s mother Irene tries to sell her story to a tabloid and is refused payment, then ends up on the news anyway. Her husband gives her a choice, and she packs a suitcase for Bristol.
Jenny’s marriage survives, for now. Jenny blamed Carrie for the anonymous notes that made Richie suspicious. But on the last page, his mother Adeline types a fresh one, and it is strongly hinted she wrote them all.
And Esther, the stranger from the first chapter, offers to mind Jacob. Kyle had chosen her address because she once fostered his cellmate and was known to be kind.
What It Means
The title is a trap. Everyone blames a woman. Jenny is blamed for hiring Carrie, Marissa for being careless, Carrie for the kidnap, Irene for the way Carrie turned out.
But Marissa tells Peter it’s nobody’s fault but his. Carrie did a terrible thing, and the book never excuses taking a child. But it also makes us see why she did it, and it asks who made her a person with nothing left to lose. I think the ending says that blame lands on the person who made the choice, and Peter made the first one, on that icy road.
Did you see the twist coming? Tell me below. Read more on the All Her Fault page at bookexplained dot com, and my book versus show video covers what the series changes.
