The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  My knees buckle and I collapse to the floor beside him, falling fast. I land facedown, my nose hitting the floor so that it begins to bleed. The blood is profuse, turning my hands red.

  I get quickly to my hands and knees. Will comes at me from behind, attempting to reach over me for my neck as I struggle to crawl away from him. I kick backward. I have to get away from him.

  My hands reach desperately for the countertop. They latch on, trying to pull me upward, but just as soon lose their grip. My hands are sweaty, my hold weak. Everywhere there is blood. It comes from my nose, my mouth. I can’t hold on to the countertop. I slip away, falling back to the floor.

  The wooden block of knives sits just out of reach, mocking me.

  I try again. Will grapples again for my ankle. He takes me by the lower leg and pulls. I kick hard, but it isn’t enough. The blows only leave him momentarily dazed but I’m growing tired, my efforts weakening. I fall facedown again on the floor, biting my tongue. I can’t keep doing this. The adrenaline in my body has slowed, the wine, the lethargy taking over.

  I don’t know that I have it in me to go on.

  But then I think of Otto, of Tate, and I know that I must go on.

  I’m on the floor facedown as Will mounts my back. All two hundred pounds of him bear down on me, forcing me face-first into the kitchen floor. I couldn’t scream if I wanted to. I can barely suck in a breath. My arms are pinned beneath me, getting crushed by Will’s weight and mine.

  I feel his hands in my hair, massaging my scalp. It’s oddly gentle. Sensuous. I feel his satisfaction at having me in this position.

  Time slows down. I try to press up against the weight of him, but go nowhere. I can’t find my arms.

  Will runs his fingers through my hair. Breathlessly he says my name. “Oh, Sadie,” he exhales. He enjoys that I’m pinned to the ground as I am, in a powerless position, a slave to my master. “My lovely wife,” he says.

  He leans in close enough that I feel his breath on my neck. He runs his lips the length of it. He bites gently on my earlobe. I let him. I can’t make him stop.

  He whispers into my ear, “If only you would have left it alone.”

  And then he clutches a handful of my hair in his tacky hand, hoists my face inches from the floor and smashes it back down to the tile.

  I’ve never felt such pain in my life. If my nose wasn’t broken before, it is now.

  He does it again.

  Whether it’s enough to eventually kill me, I don’t know. But soon it will render me unconscious. And there’s no telling what he will do then.

  This is it, I tell myself. This is where I will die.

  But then something happens.

  It’s Will, not me, who makes a sound, some strange, inarticulate scream of pain. I feel suddenly weightless, not knowing what’s happened.

  A breath later I realize that the reason for the weightlessness is that he’s fallen from my body. He’s perched inches to my side, struggling to get to his feet, though his hands are at his head and he, like me, is bleeding. His blood comes from his head, where there is a sudden laceration that wasn’t there before.

  I crane my aching neck to see. I follow the gaze of his eyes—now shrouded in fear—to see Imogen standing in the kitchen doorway. The fireplace poker is in her steady hands, and it’s raised over her head. She blurs in and out before me, until I’m not certain she’s real or a result of a head injury. Her face is deadpan. There is no emotion. No anger, no fear. She comes forward and I brace myself for the debilitating pain of the fireplace poker as it strikes me. I clench my eyes, my jaw, knowing the end is near. Imogen will kill me. She will kill the both of us. She never wanted us here.

  I grind my teeth. But the pain doesn’t come.

  I hear Will grunt instead. I open my eyes to see him stumble and fall to the ground, calling Imogen names. I look to her. Our eyes meet and I know.

  Imogen is not here to kill me. She’s come to save me.

  I see the determination in her eye as she raises the weapon for a third time.

  But one death on Imogen’s conscience is enough. I can’t let her do this for me.

  I spring to my unsteady feet. It’s not easy. Every part of me aches. The blood is abundant, in my eyes so that I can hardly see.

  I lunge forward. I throw myself at the wooden knife block, getting in between Will and Imogen. I take the chef knife into my grasp; there’s no feeling, no awareness of the handle in my hand.

  I barely register this man’s face, his eyes as he rises to standing and, at the same time, I turn to face him.

  I see the movement of his mouth. His lips move. But there’s a ringing in my ears. I can’t stand it. I think that it will never stop.

  But then it does stop. And I hear something.

  I hear that heinous laugh as he says to me, “You’d never do it, you stupid cunt.”

  He comes at me, attempts to grab the knife from my hands. He gets ahold of it for a minute, and I think, in my weakness, that I will lose the knife to him. That when I do he will use it to kill both Imogen and me.

  I pull violently back, regaining full possession of the knife.

  He comes at me again.

  I don’t think this time. I just do. I react.

  I plunge the knife into his chest, feeling nothing as the tip of the chef knife cuts right through him. I watch it happen. Imogen, behind me, watches, too.

  The blood comes next, spraying and oozing from his body as all two hundred pounds of him collapses to the floor with a dull thud.

  I hesitate at first, watching the blood pool beside him. His eyes are open. He’s alive, though the life is quickly leaving his body. He looks to me, a beseeching glance as if he thinks I might just do something to help him survive.

  An arm rises, reaches enfeebled for me. But he can’t reach me.

  He won’t ever touch me again.

  I am in the business of saving lives, not taking them. But there are exceptions to every rule. “You don’t deserve to live,” I say, feeling empowered because there’s no tremor, no shaking in my voice as I say it. My voice is as still as death.

  He blinks once, twice, and then it stops, the movement of his eyes coming to a stop, as do the heaving movements of his chest. He stops breathing.

  I fall to my hands and knees beside him. I check for a pulse.

  It’s only then, when Will is dead, that I rise and turn to Imogen, folding her into my arms, and together we cry.

  SADIE

  One Year Later...

  I stand on the beach, staring out at the ocean. The shoreline is rocky, creating tide pools that Tate splashes barefoot in. The day is cool, midfifties, but unseasonably warm for this time of year, compared to what we’re used to. It’s January. January is often bitterly cold, thick with snow. But here it’s not, and I’m grateful for it as I’m grateful for all the ways in which this life is different from our life before.

  Otto and Imogen have gone ahead to climb rock formations that extend out into the sea. The dogs are with them, tethered to leashes, eager as always to climb. I stay behind with Tate, watch as he plays. As he does, I sit on my heels, examine the rocky beach with my hands.

  It’s been a year now since we threw into a hat the names of the places we wanted to go. A decision like that shouldn’t be taken lightly. And yet we had no family to speak of, no connections, no ties. The world was our oyster. Imogen was the one to reach into the hat and pick, and before we knew it, we were California-bound.

  I’ve never been one to sugarcoat or to lie. Otto and Tate know now that their father isn’t the man he led us to believe he was. They don’t know all the details of it.

  Self-defense, it was decided in the days after Will’s death, though I don’t know if Officer Berg would have believed it if Imogen, hiding just on the other side of the kitchen door that night, hadn’t managed t
o record Will’s confession on her phone.

  She also managed to save my life.

  Hours after Will was dead, Imogen played the recording for Officer Berg. I was in the hospital, receiving treatment for my wounds. I didn’t know about it until later.

  You’re too smart for your own good, Sadie. If only you’d have let it be, this wouldn’t be happening. But I can’t have you go around telling people what I did. I’m sure you understand. And since you can’t keep your own mouth closed, it’s up to me to shut you up for good.

  Imogen and I never talked about how she hadn’t recorded the entire conversation that night, the parts where Will made it clear I was the one to physically carry out Morgan’s murder. Only she and I would ever know the whole truth. No evidence of my involvement in Morgan’s murder was found. I was exonerated. Will was charged with both women’s deaths.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. Months of therapy followed, with much more to come. My therapist is a woman named Beverly whose purple-dyed hair seems incongruous with her fifty-eight years. And yet it’s perfectly suited to her. She has tattoos, a British accent. One goal of our time together is to locate and identify my alters and reunite them into one functioning whole. Another is to face head-on the memories my mind has hidden from me, those of my stepmother and her abuse. We’re slowly succeeding.

  The kids and I have a family therapist. His name is Bob, which delights Tate. It makes him think of SpongeBob. Imogen has her own therapist, too.

  Otto goes to a private art academy, finally finding a world where he feels he fits in. Getting him there is a sacrifice. The tuition is steep and the commute long. But there is no one in the world who deserves this happiness more than Otto.

  I watch as ocean waves pound the shoreline. The spray of the waves splashes Tate and he giggles with glee.

  This beach was once the site of a city trash dump. Long ago, residents tossed their trash over the cliffs and into the Pacific Ocean. In the decades that followed, the ocean smoothed and polished that trash. It spit it back out onto the shoreline. Except that by then, time and nature had repurposed the trash into something extraordinary. It was no longer refuse but now beautiful beach glass that people come from all over the state to collect.

  I gaze at Otto and Imogen at the peak of a rock formation, sitting beside one another, talking. Otto smiles, and Imogen laughs as the wind blows through her long hair. I see Tate splashing sublimely in the tide pool with a grin. There’s a little boy beside him now; he’s made a friend. I feel light because of it, buoyant. I close my eyes and stare up at the sun. It warms me through.

  Will stole many years from my life. He stole my happiness and made me do reprehensible things. It’s taken time, but I’m finding ways to forgive myself for all that I have done. Will broke me at first. But in the process of healing, I’ve become a stronger, more confident version of myself than I used to be. In the aftermath of Will’s exploitation and his abuse, I’ve discovered the woman I was always meant to be, a woman I can be proud of, a woman my children can look up to and admire.

  I now know what true happiness is. I experience it every day.

  I step from a pair of sneakers and sink my bare feet into the sea, thinking of beach glass.

  If time can turn something so undesired into something so loved, the same can happen to all of us. The same can happen to me.

  It’s happening already.

  * * *

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Mental illness affects over forty-six million Americans each year. It is an issue of critical importance to our society, and to me personally, as I have experienced the impacts that the disease can have on a family. In The Other Mrs., Sadie is a victim of cruel manipulation by those seeking to take advantage of her illness, and in the end, she is empowered to seize control and ultimately to seek the help she needs. It is my hope that we, as a society, will continue to bring awareness to this important issue and that in the future, we will place greater emphasis on ensuring that those in need have access to proper care and treatment. For more information about mental health or dissociative identity disorder, visit the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Cleveland Clinic.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my editor, Erika Imranyi, for helping steer me in the right direction, for your diligence and dedication to this book and your patience with me. Thank you to my agent, Rachael Dillon Fried, for offering insight and endless encouragement during the writing and revision process. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished here and look forward to many more books to come. Thank you to Loriana Sacilotto, Margaret Marbury, Natalie Hallak and so many others at HarperCollins for providing indispensable editorial feedback.

  Thank you to the wonderful people at HarperCollins, Park Row Books and Sanford Greenburger Associates. I’m so grateful to be a part of such committed, hardworking teams. Thank you to my publicists, Emer Flounders and Kathleen Carter; to Sean Kapitain and crew for another fabulous cover design; to Jennifer Stimson for the copy edits; to sales and marketing; and to the proofreaders, booksellers, librarians, bloggers, bookstagrammers and everyone else who has a hand in getting my words out to readers. This wouldn’t be possible without you. And a huge thanks to my Hollywood dream team, Shari Smiley and Scott Schwimer, for your hard work and enthusiasm.

  Thank you, as always, to my family for the emotional support; to my children for allowing me to terrify you while I plotted ideas aloud; and to those incredible people who willingly and eagerly dropped everything to read a draft of this novel and provide essential feedback: Karen Horton, Janelle Kolosh, Pete Kyrychenko, Marissa Lukas, Doug Nelson, Vicky Nelson, Donna Rehs, Kelly Reinhardt, Corey Worden and Nicki Worden. This book wouldn’t be what it is without your insight and eagle eyes.

  ISBN: 9781488099601

  The Other Mrs.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mary Kyrychenko

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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