by Mary Kubica
barely suck in a breath. My arms are pinned beneath me, get-
ting crushed by Will’s weight and mine.
I feel his hands in my hair, massaging my scalp. It’s oddly gen-
tle. 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 mas-
ter. “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 ear lobe.
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, inar-
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ticulate scream of pain. I feel suddenly weightless, not know-
ing what’s happened.
A breath later I realize that the reason for the weightlessness
is that 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 fire-
place 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 stum-
ble 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 stand-
ing and, at the same time, I turn to face him.
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MARY KUBICA
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 a hold 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. Imo-
gen, 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 Imo-
gen, folding her into my arms, and together we cry.
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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 con-
nections, 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.
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MARY KUBICA
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.
Th
ey 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 to 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 tel ing 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 exon-
erated. 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
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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, sit-
ting beside one another, talking. Otto smiles, and Imogen laughs
as the wind blows through her long hair. I see Tate splashing sub-
limely 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 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, a more confident version of myself than I used to be.
In the aftermath of Will’s exploitation and his abuse, I’ve dis-
covered 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.
* * * * *
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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 dis-
ease 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 treat-
ment. For more information about mental health or dissociative
identity disorder, visit the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH) and the Cleveland Clinic.
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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, Ra-
chael Dillon Fried, for offering insight and endless encourage-
ment 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 Mar-
bury, 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 grate-
ful 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, books-
tagrammers and everyone else who has a hand in getting my
words out to readers. This wouldn’t be possible without you.
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And a huge thanks to my Hollywood dream team, Shari Smi-ley and Scott Schwimer, for your hard work and enthusiasm.
Thank you, as always, to my family for the emotional sup-
port; to my children for allowing me to terrify you while I plot-
ted 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 Nel-
son, Donna Rehs, Kelly Reinhardt, Corey Worden and Nicki
Worden. This book wouldn’t be what it is without your in-
sight and eagle eyes.
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;