Rochelle has a devilish plan to get back at her ex-husband for inflicting such pain on her. The idea isn't to hurt him, at least not physically, but to break his heart. So she hires Panna to make him fall in love with her and then to leave him. The elegant, beautiful prostitute misunderstands, even demures at first, but buys into it and sets out to execute the plan.
Rochelle and Panna have an unlikely heart-to-heart talk in a side corridor at the ex-husband's office, no less. We see that this story is much less about him and more about the two ladies. There is a kind of commiseration between the two. But what I see is a jockeying for control between them. Rochelle wants to see her plan play itself out, but to do so means crowding Panna in her professional efforts to execute it. The latter resents it, but empathizes with the former.
It's disconcerting to see in the end that Panna never quite understood what Rochelle wanted, especially as the two ladies seemed to bond further in the previous episode. But it's not surprising, because Panna isn't a psychologist after all. So what she cannot see is how much Rochelle needs for someone to understand her pain and fulfill her vengeful desire. We see that Panna is not so emotionally in-tuned: When she reports that the ex-husband felt miserable following sex with her, and was crying at the foot of the bed, she thought that the mission was accomplished. No, it wasn't. Not that she could've done anything differently. As Rochelle had to reiterate, the plan was for him to fall in love with her - the beautiful prostitute - and then for her to leave him cold.
There was no way for either lady, however, to control what the ex-husband's previous girlfriend did. Which was in fact to leave him. She was pining for her mainly. While there was some regret, some self-recrimination regarding the failed marriage, he never really fell in love with Panna. So he was in a position essentially to walk away from her. Which apparently he did. In the end, what Panna didn't see was that she was Rochelle's emotional proxy. She could neither see this nor execute it, mainly because, in a strange irony vis-a-vis the ex-husband, she wasn't really capable of falling in love or making someone fall in love with her. Had Rochelle been able to surmise this at the beginning, she would've selected another prostitute.
I am impressed with Scott Turow's writing and with Rosanna Arquette's and Nazanin Boniadi's acting. The two ladies play out the intricate emotionality of the story rather well, especially with Boniadi having to play a character with emotional tin ears.
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