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Throughout her life, Fiona, Grant’s wife, is playful and mercurial. The daughter of a well-respected doctor, she enjoys the material trappings of a rich girl but is unbothered that her mother’s left-wing politics keep her out of sorority life. She delights in teasing her suitors, especially Grant, yet it is she who proposes marriage to him, suddenly and in the form of a musing rather than a declaration of love. She is graceful and beautiful, prizing sophistication in her appearance and surroundings, but like her mother, she bucks convention by keeping her hair long even in old age. When she begins losing her memory, she is able to dismiss others’ concerns with her wit. Even Grant believes she may be playing some kind of game as she appears to be slipping into dementia. 

As she loses more of her memory and becomes acclimated to life at Meadowlake, aspects of Fiona’s personality become unrecognizable, while others shine true. She shows Aubrey a kind of affection Grant has never seen from her. When the nursing home staff dresses her in clothes she would never have chosen for herself, she seems not to mind and even says without concern she hadn’t noticed that they had cut her hair. In the final scene, even though she does not recognize the book of paintings as a gift from Grant, she enjoys it as he imagined she might, a contrast to her uninterested rejection of the gift when he first brings it. That she is sitting up in a chair rather than lying uncharacteristically in bed as she was earlier, as well as her recognition that the yellow dress she is wearing is not her own, indicates that her gestures of affection are in recognition of Grant as her husband. 

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