Andrew Winchester

Andrew handles Nina's outbursts calmly, defends Millie when his wife accuses her and gets the maid out of the police station after Nina reports the car stolen. On Broadway night, the two end up at a hotel and start an affair. He promises things will change, and Millie starts to believe that, with him, life might finally work out.

From the outside, Andrew is the saint of the story: the man who stood by a wife who was institutionalized and accused of trying to drown their daughter. The neighbors feel sorry for him. His mother, Evelyn, keeps reminding everyone that her son deserved better.

The china Andrew inherited from Evelyn is untouchable. When Millie breaks a plate, the mask comes off. Andrew makes her cut herself once for every piece, 21 times, then drugs her and locks her in the attic.

The truth comes out in a letter from Nina. Andrew had been doing this to his wife for years. He locked her in the attic, forced her to pull out her hair and built the story that Nina tried to drown Cece, so no one would believe her. No wonder their daughter was always wary around her father.

Millie, whom Nina chose precisely because she could fight back, wounds Andrew and locks him in the attic. To get out, he has to pull one of his own teeth with pliers. Andrew breaks free, attacks Nina and Millie, and Millie pushes him down the stairs. The fall kills him.

The man who punished every slip with the attic ends up a victim of his own rule: locked up there, in control of nothing, by the maid he thought he had broken.

Nina leaves a lightbulb near the body so the death looks like an accident. Officer Connors has doubts, but her sister was once engaged to Andrew, and she decides to call it a freak accident.

For anyone who knows the story, that choice says a lot: Andrew had hurt another woman before Nina, and his former fiancée's family never forgot.

At the funeral, Evelyn remarks on her son's missing teeth in front of the mourners. No one quite follows, and the service moves on. Andrew is gone from the lives of the two women he tried to break.

In Freida McFadden's book, Andrew dies of thirst locked in the attic, and there is no china: the punishment involves heavy books. At the funeral, his mother reveals a detail from Andrew's childhood that the movie leaves out. Brandon Sklenar, who plays Andrew, had just come off It Ends with Us.