Helen Thorpe

Meet Helen Thorpe. She’s smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia’s gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen’s former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs.

When Buddhist butler Helen Thorpe is loaned out to help Cartier Hightower get her life in order, Helen finds herself working for a young woman entirely unbound by the fetters of good taste or sound judgment. One of Cartier’s fellow content creators has recently died in a strange accident. Soon after Helen arrives, another is killed in an equally bizarre way. Cartier begins to drag Helen around on the influencer circuit, where neither of them is particularly welcome.

Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant. The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. Helen and her employer, Mr. Levine, have come to Side Island to assist David, his youngest son, who is facilitating the course.