348 pages
Published: April 5, 2022
by St. Martin’s Press
Read: January 2023
THE HUSBAND
A heart surgeon at the top of his field, Stephen Aston is getting married again. But first he must divorce his current wife, even though she can no longer speak for herself.
THE DAUGHTERS
Tully and Rachel Aston look upon their father’s fiancée, Heather, as nothing but an interloper. Heather is younger than both of them. Clearly, she’s after their father’s money.
THE FORMER WIFE
With their mother in a precarious position, Tully and Rachel are determined to get to the truth about their family’s secrets, the new wife closing in, and who their father really is.
THE YOUNGER WIFE
Heather has secrets of her own. Will getting to the truth unleash the most dangerous impulses in all of them?
Trigger warnings: domestic abuse, miscarriage, dementia
Main Characters
- Tully – Older daughter, ‘happily’ married, kleptomaniac
- Rachel – Younger daughter, beautiful, cake baker, doesn’t date people
- Heather – The younger, soon to be wife of Stephen; she was his interior decorator
- Stephen – Heart surgeon, father of Tully and Rachel
- Pam – Stephen’s wife, Tully and Rachel’s mom; she is suffering from dementia
- Fiona – A mystery name that pops up in the book
- Darcy – Rachel’s delivery man
My Review
This book reminded me of something Liane Moriarty would write (Apples Never Fall, for example) with the family dynamics and the way the story unfolded.
The book starts at a wedding with the narrator being an older woman, but we don’t know who she is. After the exchange of vows the couple goes back with family to sign documents, and all of a sudden you hear a scream and there’s blood everywhere and someone’s asking for a doctor!
We then jump to a different timeline as we get to know the characters in the relationships between Steven and Heather and Steven’s daughters. Tully is obsessed with stealing items and we find out that’s her way of coping with stress. Her husband has recently found out about a bad investment and they have lost all their money. Her 2 year old son won’t sleep in his toddler bed and Tully is frustrated with his other outbursts of behavior. Rachel has her own baking company and she copes with her issues by baking and over eating.
This book was engaging and I thought well paced. It was full of secrets and lies – and second guessing what is actually going on. While there is some gaslighting of the victims of the assaults, l felt like it helped to build the storyline.
Spoilers
u003cstrongu003eWarningu003c/strongu003e: This section contains spoilers! Do not expand this section if you don’t want to know what happened in the book!
Tully turns out to be a kleptomaniac. Rachel is sexually assaulted when she was 16 and has turned to food as a way to cope. She likes to bake and eat her feelings. She ends up in a relationship with Darcy. Heather miscarries Stephen’s baby after an argument with him and he gives her pills at the hospital – do we ever really know if they caused the miscarriage?
Fiona ends up being the first wife of their father Stephen – he supposedly hurt her as well. Stephen ends up dead at the end, Rachel killed him with a blunt force trauma to his head when she saw him chokehold their mother. It seemed that all of the suspicions came true with the look in his eyes.
The money in the water bottle, turns out to have come from Pam’s mom. Pam had been planning on using it for a trip.
The ending is a little ambiguous as to whether Stephen actually was an abuser. It jumps to Pam, thinking about all of the time she was hurt and calling yourself a klutz, but then realizing that Stephen was there every time. It isn’t completely acknowledged whether he was an abuser or not, but with the similar way he strangled her and then made her believe it didn’t happen (like he did to Heather) basically confirms it.