The Starter Wife

by Nina Laurin

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

  Copyright © 2019 by Ioulia Zaitchik

  Excerpt from What My Sister Knew copyright © 2018 by Ioulia Zaitchik

  Cover design by Lisa Amoroso

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2019

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  ISBN: 978-1-5387-1571-0 (trade paperback), 978-1-5387-1573-4 (ebook)

  E3-20190501-NF-DA

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Part One: Claire Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Part Two: Tracy CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Nina Laurin

  A Preview of “What My Sister Knew”

  About the Author

  Also by Nina Laurin

  Praise for Nina Laurin

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  Part One

  Claire

  Prologue

  Last night, I saw you, with the wifey. In the restaurant where I wait tables. You didn’t see me, and neither did she, but that’s normal because I wear a uniform that matches the walls, as if I’m meant by design to blend in, be furniture. That restaurant isn’t fancy, hardly a place where you’d want to bring your date—not if you plan on getting laid afterwards. But for you two, it was a delicious joke you shared along with your popcorn shrimp appetizer. A little moment of kitsch, like going to ride the Ferris wheel at the town fair.

  I thought it was an extraordinary coincidence. A sign from the stars. Surely you had no idea I’d be here—and I hadn’t planned on seeing you. I panicked when I saw you two walk in, her first, because you held the door for her like a gentleman. My palms went clammy instantly, and I wiped them on the sides of my polyester shirt. In my cowardice, I even prayed that Lizzie the hostess wouldn’t sit you in my section, but then again, I knew she would. The place was empty that night, and everyone there knew I needed the tips because I could only work weekends, no school nights. She was being nice to me because she, like everyone there, felt sorry for me, the youngest, least skilled waitress in the place.

  But there you were, so I pulled myself together and went to give you menus, and even when I rattled off the specials (I didn’t once screw up or give myself away in any way, of which I’m still proud), you didn’t glance away from your wife’s face and look at me. You both looked so flushed and happy, like you were popping in for a greasy snack after rolling in bed all afternoon. You only had eyes for each other.

  It would have been just another ordinary night—you eat, you pay, you tip, and you leave, to go back to bed, maybe. But then a miracle happened, a miracle that sent my whole world spinning off its orbit. A true sign from above.

  After I cleared away your plates and put in the order for your dessert (cherry pie with ice cream—two spoons, of course), I found myself overwhelmed, needing a moment alone. I raced to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall to catch my breath—okay, to slip my hand inside the elastic waist of my uniform pants and touch myself. But no matter how furiously I rubbed myself through my panties, it just wasn’t happening—I hovered on the brink, frustration growing and threatening to crest into something uglier. That’s when I heard the door open, and froze. If anyone caught me hiding out in the bathroom, I might get in trouble. I pulled my legs up onto the toilet seat so they couldn’t see me.

  Your wifey’s sneakered feet shuffled past. I couldn’t have missed these sneakers, hot pink edged in fluorescent yellow, the kind rich ladies wear to their workouts and to run weekend errands. My own work sneakers were once plain white but turned gray, a generic brand, bought on sale. I stared at their toes the whole time she was there, in the stall next to mine. She knelt on the floor, ignoring the scattered bits of tissue, black yoga pants strained at her hips, and the unmistakable sounds of retching followed almost immediately.

  I’ll never know whether she was making herself puke, like those girls at school. It’s not important. I remember watching her get up, and then one foot came off the floor, and the toilet flushed. The door of the stall clacked open; the rush of tap water followed, and after it, the cacophony of the hand dryer. At last, the door squeaked softly closed behind her. I burst out of the stall, a mess of relief and giddiness, and then I saw it. The miracle.

  Sitting there, on the edge of the sink, in a little puddle of soapy water, was her engagement ring. Old looking, an antique or heirloom—I imagined your mother giving it to you, passed down from some great-great-grandmother, to be given to the woman of your heart someday. A big emerald glimmered darkly in a setting of tiny diamonds and platinum leaves.

  And she left it in the bathroom of a shitty chain restaurant, thoughtlessly slid it off her soapy finger and plunked it down on the cracked porcelain like it was a cheap bit of costume jewelry. That’s when I knew. I knew she didn’t deserve you. And I knew I could—would—take you away from her, no matter what it took. A higher being was on my side, and he sent me the ring as an omen.

  I snatched it off the sink and put it in a place where no one would find it, even if—when—she noticed and raised a stink, and in case the manager wanted to search all of us.

 
; But I knew it wouldn’t happen.

  Fate was on my side.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Byron let me sleep in this morning.

  There. That way, it sounds nicer than “my husband snuck out of the house while I was still asleep.” Because that’s exactly what happened and what’s been happening every day of the week so far, and we’re at Thursday.

  This morning, the balmy September sun finally gave way to rain, and with the bedroom windows facing north, it’s still kind of dark when I wake up. It could have been just dawn breaking, around seven a.m. Except Byron’s side of the bed is empty and there are no footsteps downstairs in the kitchen, no water running in the bathroom.

  I get up, grab the imitation ring from the nightstand, and put it on the ring finger of my left hand, where it settles into the groove it has made in the skin. He just presented me with it one day, and I didn’t press the issue further. He never actually told me whether the stones were real. I decided to let it go and never asked.

  It’s ten thirty. I run my fingers through my hair, which is tangled and matted with sweat, and eye the digital clock in mild dismay. Yesterday it was ten ten. The day before, on Monday, it was nine fifty. Byron gets up at seven every morning like clockwork—to go running in good weather and to hit the gym at the college in bad. If he goes running, he comes back to take a shower before changing to go to work.

  September has been beautiful this year, dry and sun filled. He hasn’t gone running once, as far as I can tell.

  At the start, I’d get up at six fifty and have breakfast ready for him: French toast and cheese omelet, with a glass of orange juice and coffee with cream. Now I’m wondering if he ate all that fatty food to be polite, because these days his breakfast is an energy bar. And I guess I can’t complain—I see other men his age at university events when he takes me. By forty, they have paunches and double chins while Byron, at forty-seven, has the body of someone half his age. He’s also one of the lucky ones who has his hair, all of it—except with age, the points of the M of his hairline have sharpened a little, and the blond color has grown bleak with gray hairs. When I met him, it was easier to forget the twenty-year age difference.

  And that name. The name caught my attention even before he did, took me back to high school English lit where the teacher made us pick poems apart to the bare bones. I hated it—it ruined their beauty, made the magic evaporate.

  Ironically, the original Byron never had a romance that wasn’t thoroughly dysfunctional—ranging from mildly unhealthy to downright unhinged. Back when he was courting me, it didn’t raise any red flags.

  Then again, neither did the first wife.

  I make my way downstairs and start the espresso machine. Byron is particular about his coffee beans while I could drink any swill from a filter—the way he puts it. The truth is I find the fancy espresso too bitter, too sour, like sandpaper on the palate. But today I’m feeling especially foggy so the caffeine buzz seems worth the tongue torture. And those exotic beans do deliver the buzz—can’t complain about that.

  While the machine hisses, I get my laptop from the little office Byron set up for me upstairs, the one I almost never use. Whenever I can, I sit outside or down in the living room in front of the giant bay window, basking in the natural light. That’s what I do now, pulling up my pajama-clad legs and balancing the sleek Mac on my knee. I check both my email accounts, the personal one and the one I use for writing-related contacts, even though no one ever emails me on either. My friends, the few who still keep in touch, prefer to text, and the last batch of queries I sent dates back months. Some agents still have my manuscript but let’s face it—it’s not going to happen.

  The cliché should make me sad. I admit I cringed a little all these months ago when I first wrote my bio for emailing literary agents. Back then, I was full of optimism and hope, with Byron leaning over my shoulder to peek at the screen and then kissing my temple and working his way down to my neck. Here’s what it says, in clunky third person that’s apparently industry standard: Claire Westcott has a degree in English and creative writing from Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in the campus newspaper as well as several small literary publications. Presently, Claire writes full-time. She lives with her husband, a professor of literature at Mansfield Liberal Arts College in Ohio.

  This is a fancy way of saying I’m one of those women. Those girls my evolved, progressive classmates at Ohio State sneered at: the boring white women who married a man who can support them while they write their irrelevant little stories. I know I’m not exactly in the zeitgeist, but Byron loved to tease me about it, calling himself the Leonard to my future Virginia Woolf, a man destined to fade in his famous writer wife’s shadow.

  I didn’t remind him how that story ended. I wasn’t thinking about it at all in happier times.

  Now, as I open the second inbox, it dings, a sound that now fills me with dread rather than anticipation. Looks like one of my queries has netted a response, months later. I scan the form letter shallowly when the ding repeats itself. Two in one day? But the ding is from my personal inbox this time.

  There’s no subject line, and the address is gibberish. I really shouldn’t click on it—it’s probably a virus—but my hands are faster than my mind today. As I rush to hit the Back button, the image downloads, and my hand freezes over the touch pad. It knocks the wind out of me. I stare at it, my eyes drinking in every pixel, but there is no explanation.

  I’m looking at a close-up of the emerald in my ring. My replacement ring? The real thing? But it’s…impossible.

  Then I see the name of the sender, and it takes everything I have not to slam the laptop shut and hurl it away from me, as far as possible, like it’s a venomous spider nestled in my lap.

  COLLEEN.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Colleen may have died but she never left.

  The fact that we live in her house is hard to forget. Just like the fact that we live off her sizable savings, which went to her husband when she died since she had no other family. Byron never directly said so, but I know that’s how he’s able to support his future Virginia Woolf while maintaining our lifestyle, all on his generous but not exactly millionaire’s salary at the college.

  I haven’t worked in two years but I get new clothes every season, and every eight weeks, I get my roots bleached and carefully toned to a perfect wheat blond and then streaked with corn-silk highlights. I drive an hour to the good salon in Columbus while everyone I know goes to the local place, run by a middle-aged woman with a bouffant hairdo who charges about a third of what the Columbus place does. Sadly, she’s also a firm believer in wedge cuts for anyone over twenty-two.

  So I drive and sit in that chair for hours, holding my head straight and smiling while my hair is pulled and tugged and slathered with chemicals, and then I hand over the family credit card. Another three hundred of Colleen’s dollars, plus tip, changes hands invisibly. No crass cash.

  I try to convince myself there’s no reason to feel guilty. It’s not like he left her for a younger woman or threw her out on the street or dumped her with three kids and no alimony, or any such sordid story, all too common in this town. She died. He grieved but then moved on. Selling that monolith of a house, in such a market, would have been insane. So would moving away from a perfectly good job with the prospect of tenure looming on the horizon. Byron repeated that to me hundreds of times. Everything makes sense.

  Rationally, that is. What I feel is anything but.

  Some days, after a not-so-great day in the Westcott household, I drive to the local mall and buy things I don’t need, hideous clothes I’ll never wear, tacky pink makeup. I tell myself it’s my petty revenge against Byron, but really it’s my revenge against Colleen, as if wasting some of her money can make up for the thousand little humiliations I suffer.

  Eventually, I know the savings will run out, and I don’t plan to make Byron support me forever. My novel is pretty much dead in the water. The next novel, the one I�
�m supposed to be writing while my husband is at work, is clearly never happening. So now I’m looking for work—starting to. I’ve set up profiles on the big job-search sites and made a separate email address. I haven’t sent out any CVs yet.

  That’s what I was going to do when I got the email from Colleen.

  That, of course, is utterly insane. Every part of it: that Colleen is alive, that Colleen has my ring, and that Colleen just sent me an email from a dummy address. If that email wasn’t sitting right there in my inbox, I’d think I was going out of my mind.

  I put my laptop aside carefully and get up. There’s no sun flooding in through the bay window today. The glass is speckled with rain, droplets and silvery streaks. I peer through them with mistrust, convinced—my skin crawling with the feeling—that someone on the other side is watching me, observing me like a fish in an aquarium.

  Then I go back to the kitchen where the cup of coffee sits under the little tap of the machine, still steaming, but just barely. I’ve lost all taste for coffee. Adrenaline woke me up better than espresso could, and the thought of gulping down that gritty, bitter nonsense makes me shudder. I dump it in the sink and then go have a shower. I wash my hair, blow-dry it with the round brush, and put on makeup—the good stuff for special occasions, the expensive foundation and mascara, hoping that, if I look like me, I’ll feel like me. Tough. I feel like the same jittery mess, but with makeup on.

  From here, I decide to tackle it head-on. There are ways of figuring out where an email came from. IP address and such. I can google it. At least I could try. To get my real, rightful ring back, of course. Only to get my ring back from whoever stole it.

  Not because I think it could actually be…her.

  With a decisive intake of breath, I sit on the living room couch, back straight, knees together like I’m in elementary school, and open my laptop. I don’t look at the email…yet. I google how to find out where an email comes from and spend another ten minutes blinking helplessly at walls of text studded with unfamiliar terms.