The Starter Wife

by Nina Laurin

  I blink, and my husband’s face becomes his face again. Indescribable relief fills me. My heart is lighter than a balloon. It wasn’t a mistake after all. I did everything I was supposed to do. I did everything right. Fate guided me, and I followed—I followed it through to the very end.

  Byron is my husband, and I love him, even if he doesn’t love me. That’s what true love is. True love only gives and asks for nothing in return. True love is magnanimous. True love is self-sufficient.

  Everything around me disappears. It’s just the two of us in my tunnel vision, and everything else goes dark. My lips start to form his name—Byron, Byron, Byron—but don’t have time to complete the first syllable.

  Something crashes over me from behind. A vicious pain flares in the back of my skull. My vision bursts with white sparks and then white begins to encroach at the edges, flooding everything. I feel myself begin to topple, my knees giving way. The floor rushes toward me but there’s no shock or pain of impact. It’s like falling into a cloud.

  I want to laugh but I can’t feel my lips anymore. What a burden true love is. No one will ever understand. They will all think I’m crazy, insane, psychotic, but what else is love but madness? Isn’t that what all the great novels are about?

  My husband should know. He teaches them to naïve teenage girls every day, year in and year out. And those girls in college who have always been so contemptuous of me, who whispered behind my back and called me a pathetic throwback and prude—they will never know one-tenth of the pain I went through, all in the name of the great love they only read about in Byron’s class. They think they know hardship and suffering but they know nothing. They kiss their boyfriends, whose names they won’t remember by senior year, they make out with each other in bars, but they know nothing of true love. The love that kills.

  Faintly, before my sight flickers out, I see a figure standing over me. A woman. Brandishing something. I think it’s a hammer—it’s all so out of focus that I can’t tell. Maybe it’s a lamp or a vase. Or a wine bottle. The only thing I can see clearly is her boots. Shiny fake leather trimmed with fur, also fake.

  No. It can’t be. A synapse fires deep within my damaged brain but fizzles and flickers out to nothing. I know who she is but can’t make the connection. Only one name rises out of my murky memory and floats to my lips.

  Colleen.

  The last thing I see is her dropping the hammer. It clatters to the floor, inches from my face. And then I fall away, tumbling into the white nothingness.

  EPILOGUE

  The Mansfield College Canvas Official Blog

  OPINION:

  MURDERER OR VICTIM? LET’S NOT JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS

  by Mia Flynn

  Controversies continue to surround the case of Mansfield professor Byron Westcott and the death of his wife, Claire Westcott. The bizarre case has captivated nationwide media attention, but no one is more affected than us—students and faculty who have worked and studied with Prof. Westcott for more than a decade.

  Westcott, beloved professor of literature, was previously married to painter and former Mansfield professor Colleen May, whose death under suspicious circumstances in 2010 was ruled a suicide following a short investigation. And three months ago, police responded to a frantic 911 call from Byron Westcott. They found him next to the body of his second wife, Claire, with Claire’s sister, Christine Belfour, seriously injured on the floor next to her. It appeared that Ms. Belfour had delivered the fatal blow to Claire Westcott after a violent struggle. Christine Belfour, a manicurist from Cincinnati with a history of alcohol abuse, is still in the hospital following injuries to her head and spine. Byron Westcott remains in custody.

  However, so much about the case is still shrouded in mystery. What happened between Byron and Claire Westcott? Troublesome testimonies about Claire Westcott’s character have surfaced—namely, from other faculty members at Mansfield as well as a doctor and staff of a local fertility clinic.

  How did Christine “Chrissy” Belfour, who’s been reportedly estranged from her sister for years, find herself in her home that fateful day? Is it all connected to Colleen May? How did Dr. May really die, and where is her body?

  And the big one: Is Byron Westcott the victim or a cold-blooded and manipulative murderer?

  The police investigation is underway. But it looks like we won’t know the truth for a while, if ever.

  Which leaves us with more questions that may never have an answer. How well do we know those closest to us? So many of us have taken Dr. Westcott’s classes and loved his lectures. I have been his TA for the last year, and it’s hard for me to imagine this kind, generous man guilty of any kind of wrongdoing. Right now, it looks like he might never come back to Mansfield or to teaching ever again.

  In this strange and complicated case, it’s easy to designate a scapegoat or jump to conclusions. But I, for one, choose to believe in Byron Westcott’s innocence.

  COMMENTS:

  ValerieJ: yeeeeeah. *sarcasm* believe the guy about the dead woman. How convenient!

  Ramonathepest: the victim blaming in this piece is SICKENING imho. What are mods thinking??!?? Take it down!!!

  WokieMcWokeface: uhuhhhh. Dead women tell no tales, especially when a Straight White Male is telling the TRUTH, everybody!!!

  Ramonathepest: See Wokie we were right about him all along.

  Jake015: You’re all crazy. CW basically brained her sister w/a hammer. I saw it on the news the other day. It was self-defense. Poor guy.

  Ramonathepest: STFU Jake015 before I report you

  Notyourmothersfeminist: Ugh, everyone knows Mia is

  Notyourmothersfeminist: [comment removed by moderator]

  Acknowledgments

  As always, thank you to my agent, Rachel Ekstrom Courage, and everyone at Folio Literary. Also thanks to Miranda Graeme, one of the earliest readers of this book, for her feedback and notes.

  Thank you to Alex Logan (without whose editorial guidance I’d be a meandering mess), Kristin Roth Nappier, Mari Okuda, and the team at Grand Central Publishing for helping me unleash Claire Westcott upon the unsuspecting world. Huge thank-you to Kamrun Nesa and Tiffany Sanchez, publicity and marketing team extraordinaire!

  As usual, thanks go out to Maude Michaud and The Ladies, in whose encouraging presence I wrote parts of the manuscript that would become The Starter Wife.

  No real people were exploited as inspiration for this book but I’d like to thank the authors whose fiction fuels my crazy ideas. Thanks to David Bell, Heather Gudenkauf, Meg Gardiner, Wendy Walker, and others who have said kind words about my writing.

  Thank you to Patrick and to my family for your unwavering support.

  And finally, thank you to all the readers who pick up my books! You are truly what it’s all about.

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  I look up at the TV screen, and my twin brother’s face is splashed across it, life-size. It’s a shock that makes my breath catch. This is my brother as an adult, my brother whom I last saw fifteen years ago after the fire that killed our parents, covered in soot, clutching a lighter in his hand, his knuckles stark white against the dirt and ash.

  What did you do this time, Eli?

  What the hell did you do?

  Please turn the page for an excerpt from What My Sister Knew by Nina Laurin.

  Available now.

  CHAPTER ONE

  April 10, 3:44 a.m.

  A sticky thread of saliva runs from the corner of my mouth down to my earlobe, cool across my cheek. My vertebrae feel like a bunch of disconnected Lego pieces but I manage to hold up my head.

  Humid April wind howls through the car. That’s not right. Then I realize there’s no windshield and the gleaming uncut diamonds scattered all over the passenger seat are glass shards.

  My temple throbs with hot, clean pain, and I realize I need to cal
l someone: Milton, or better yet, an ambulance. Why didn’t the airbag work? The light from the car—the one surviving headlight, like a beam of a lost lighthouse in the night—shines into emptiness filled with stray raindrops, catching the side of the tree that I wrapped my car around.

  When I raise my hand to my forehead, my fingers come away coated with slick, shiny blood. More of it is already running down my neck under my collar—foreheads bleed a lot. An ambulance sounds better and better, but I don’t know where to even begin looking for my phone. Was I texting when I crashed? Checking my email? They’re going to ask that, and I have to say no. I sometimes use my phone as a GPS, but not tonight. I’ve taken this route a million times. When there’s no traffic, and there’s never any traffic, it takes me forty-five minutes to get home.

  The door is stuck, and for a few moments, I tug and push and pull on the handle, consumed by ever-growing panic. But then, once I give it a kick, it comes unstuck and swings open. Getting out is a feat. I unfold my aching body and have to hold on to the car door to keep from falling over. After stumbling through the usual debris on the side of the highway, I breathe a sigh of relief when there’s finally flat, solid asphalt beneath my feet, the yellow stripe in its center curving into the dark distance. I follow it. Down the road, there’s a gas station. If I were driving, it would be right there around that curve. I don’t know how far it is on foot but, hopefully, not that far.

  I take one step after another until the road steadies itself beneath my feet and stops swaying. Next thing I know, when I turn around, I can no longer see my car. The one headlight went out, and now it’s just me and the sky and the road.

  My heart starts to thunder, which makes my forehead bleed more—or at least it feels like it, that little throbbing pulse intensifying. Maybe I should have stayed and looked for my phone in the wilted grass of the ditch. Anything could be out here on this road. The darkness is alive.

  I wrap my arms around myself and do my best to walk faster, but a rush of dizziness stops me in my tracks. When I close my eyes, an image flashes in front of them, a shadow. A figure. Except this isn’t imagination—it’s memory. It’s vivid, fresh. I’m driving, twin beams of my car’s headlights intact, my hands firmly on the steering wheel, my mind calm in that dull way it is after a long, late shift. I’m thinking about a bath and a bowl of ramen noodles in front of the TV I will only half watch because nothing good is on that late.

  The shadow flickers out of nowhere, my headlights snatching it out of the darkness. It’s the silhouette of a man, standing stock-still in the middle of the road, right over that yellow line.

  I open my eyes, and there’s nothing—no car, no lights, no figure. A glow in the distance suggests that I’m getting closer to the gas station and, hopefully, a phone and an ambulance. At the same time, the dizziness settles in, and I fight the temptation to sit down, just for a moment. Or better yet, lie down, right here on the side of the road. This means I have a concussion, which means I need to do precisely the opposite, as I learned in my mandatory first aid courses.

  A spike of headache drives itself into my temple, and when I flinch, the image springs back up, like a movie I paused in the middle of the action. I’m careening toward the figure at eighty miles per hour. When I react, it’s already too late to slow down, to give him a wide berth. The car’s headlights bathe him in bluish light, erasing facial features, bleaching out everything except a strange harlequin pattern of splotches and spots that look black against his ghostly skin. Just as I swerve the steering wheel and hit the brakes, I have time to see that I was wrong—it’s not black. It’s red, red like ripe cherries and rust.

  Then the world spins, the road is gone, and so is the figure. My eyes snap open just as everything explodes. Bang.

  I’m panting and need to stop to catch my breath, hands on my knees. The gas station is finally in view, deserted but all aglow like a church on Christmas Eve.

  Only a few more steps and I’ve reached salvation.

  * * *

  What follows is a blur but somehow I find myself on a gurney with a blanket around my shoulders, and an ambulance tech is shining a flashlight into my eyes. Whether I have a concussion or not, the cut on my temple keeps oozing blood so they tape a gauze pad over it. I expect someone to ask me what happened but no one does. Through the open doors, I watch the ambulance lights bounce off the rain-slicked road. Is that what happened? Did my car skid? Maybe I fell asleep at the wheel.

  “Ms. Boudreaux?” the ambulance tech is saying. They already know my name, which means they ran my car’s plates. Then I see my open purse just sitting there in the middle of the wet road, my wallet splayed open next to it. Oh. How did it get here? I don’t remember grabbing it as I got out. “We’re taking you to Saint Joseph Hospital, all right? For observation.”

  I hate that soothing tone, maybe because I’ve oftentimes used it myself, on frightened teenage runaways who show up at the shelter where I work. But whether I like it or not, it has the intended effect: He could be saying literally anything in that calm, measured voice. It’s the intonation and timbre that have the effect.

  “We’ll notify your family,” the tech says. It’s that word that wakes me up, overriding whatever he just shot into the crook of my elbow. I make a clumsy move to grasp his forearm.

  “Wait. There’s someone else there.” I must have hit my head harder than I thought—I can barely get the words out, slurring and misshapen.

  He frowns. “Someone else?”

  “I saw someone. Maybe they’re hurt.”

  “You mean you hit someone?”

  I give a vigorous shake of my head. I’m disoriented as hell, but this I’m sure of. Certain. Although when I think about it, I have no reason to be so certain, considering I still go to AA meetings once a week. “No. I saw someone.” I didn’t drink, I didn’t take anything, I haven’t even smoked a joint in months. That part of my memory is crystal clear. I wasn’t wasted, and I didn’t run anyone over.

  But there was a man, covered in blood. And by the time I came to, a few minutes later—or maybe hours later, for all I know—he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  This is what they tell Milton when he gets there: I was driving home from work, crashed my car, and hit my head. They think I have a concussion. They don’t hook me up to any machines, only an IV and a heart rate monitor. I’m in a room with four or five other people. I can’t tell exactly how many because the space is separated by white plastic curtains that smell faintly of cleanser. When all of them are closed, the space I have to myself is just big enough to accommodate the bed itself and the plastic chair next to it.

  My health insurance through work only covers the most basic stuff. In retrospect, I should have swallowed my pride and let my adoptive mother put me on the family plan. The family plan includes separate rooms. And probably a monogrammed bathrobe as a souvenir. That same plan once gave me braces for my teeth and laser treatments for the burn scars on my chest, neck, and upper arms. The braces did their job; the laser treatment…not so much.

  Far over my head, positioned at an angle above the curtains so that everyone in the room can see it, is a TV screen. It’s hard to watch without painfully craning my neck, and anyway, the channel is fuzzy with static.

  The curtain crinkles, and its metal rings clink against the curtain rod, alerting me that Milt is back. I lower my head onto the flat hospital pillow and try to look appropriately injured.

  He’s brought me sour candies and a can of the exact no-name orange soda I like, presumably from the vending machine downstairs. There’s nothing like favorite childhood junk foods to make you feel better but right now I can barely bring myself to look at the treats.

  “Quick,” he says, tossing me the bag of sour candies. I catch it in midair. “Before the nurse comes in and sees you.” He winks, and I do my best not to cringe.

  Few people wear their name quite as badly as Milt does. My gorgeous, six-foot-two, blond, blue-eyed, college soccer champion f
iancé—pardon, ex-fiancé. It’s easy to forget. Even when I still had the ring he gave me, I hardly ever wore it, not because I didn’t appreciate it but because I’d never think of wearing a two-carat diamond to work at the homeless youth shelter. When the ring disappeared, my first logical thought was to tell him that someone stole it.

  Milton wasn’t my type until I met him. In fact, he was the opposite of my type. I always liked the dangerous boys, dark eyes and hair in need of clippers, a tattoo peeking out from under a collar or sleeve. When we met, I was at a party where I barely knew anyone, pursuing one or another such boy—I don’t even remember which anymore. I remember getting stupid-drunk on those canned, premixed, malty-tasting sex on the beach drinks because the boy failed to show.

  It wasn’t a love-at-first-sight thing; Milt was there with somebody else. I never really knew who that girl was or what happened to her, because the next time Milton and I met, I pretended not to remember that party. It was more than a year later. I’d had time to grow out my ugly haircut and realize that black lipstick wasn’t for me. I hoped he wouldn’t recognize me, but I underestimated his ability to notice details. Because he recognized me, all right.

  And within another two years, I somehow had not just Milt but also the diamond, the town house, all those things so normal and conventional it made them magical somehow. Everyone sort of expected me to die in a ditch, and here I was, with a mortgage and a reluctant subscription to a bridal magazine.

  Of course, it couldn’t have lasted. Just as we were already deciding on venues and caterers, I went and fucked it all up. Milt doesn’t have the heart to leave me, so we’re not broken up—we’re taking a break. Same word, different formulation, but he doesn’t see it’s essentially the same meaning. He let me have the town house while he lives in his parents’ summer residence.