by Jane Green
Praise for Jane Green’s previous bestsellers
“[For] any woman who has lost her way in the confusion of modern life…will make you squeal with laughter.”
—Cosmopolitan
“A total bon-bon.”
—USA Today
“Pluck it off the shelf.”
—People
“Smart and complex.”
—The Washington Post
“Righteously hilarious.”
—Glamour
“Compulsively readable.”
—The Times (London)
Praise for The Other Woman
“Un-put-down-able.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Unexpectedly honest.”
—Entertainment Weekly (A-)
“Warm, convincing, and eminently readable.”
—Booklist
“A must-read for anyone who’s ever experienced overzealous in-laws.”
—Glamour (UK)
“We never fail to find ourselves moved to hysterical laughter as well as tears by Jane Green’s heroines. And you can quote us on that.”
—Heat (UK)
“With a style that’s conspiratorial, warm, and involving, her tale will send a shiver down the spines of brides everywhere.”
—Mirror (UK)
Also Available by Jane Green
Jemima J
Mr. Maybe
Bookends
Babyville
Straight Talking
To Have and To Hold
Swapping Lives
Second Chance
The Beach House
Dune Road
Promises to Keep
Another Piece of My Heart
Family Pictures
Tempting Fate
Saving Grace
Summer Secrets
Falling
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2004 by Jane Green
Excerpt from The Sunshine Sisters copyright © 2017 by Jane Green
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9781101213278
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Viking edition as follows:
Green, Jane.
The other woman / Jane Green.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-03404-5 (hc.)
ISBN 978-0-452-28714-3 (pbk.)
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Mothers-in-law—Fiction. 3. Married women—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6057.R3443O87 2005
823'.914—dc22
2004061194
Viking hardcover edition / March 2005
Plume trade paperback edition / June 2006
Berkley ebook edition / February 2017
Cover photo: “coffee break” © Sandra Nataly/ArcAngel Images
Cover design by Rita Frangie
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_3
Contents
Praise for Jane Green
Also Available by Jane Green
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Excerpt from The Sunshine Sisters
About the Author
Acknowledgments
For their help, support, and kindness:
Heidi Armitage, Maxine Bleiweis, Margie Freilich-Den and all at the Westport Library, Deborah Feingold, Dina Fleischmann, Anthony Goff, Charlie and Karen Green, Stacy and Michael Greenberg, Dr. Melanie Mier, Louise Moore, Jean Neubohn, Donna Poppy, Deborah Schneider, Marie Skinner.
1
Pulling a sickie is not something I’m prone to do. And, while I’d like to say I feel sick, I don’t. Not unless prewedding nerves, last-minute jitters, and horrific amounts of stress count.
But nevertheless this morning I decided I deserved a day off—hell, possibly even two—so I phoned in first thing, knowing that as bad a liar as I am, it would be far easier to lie to Penny, the receptionist, than to my boss.
“Oh, poor you.” Penny’s voice was full of sympathy. “But it’s not surprising, given the wedding. Must be all the stress. You should just go to bed in a darkened room.”
“I will,” I said huskily, swiftly catching myself in the lie—migraine symptoms not including sore throats or fake sneezes—and getting off the phone as quickly as possible.
I did think vaguely about doing something delicious for myself today, something I’d never normally do. Manicures, pedicures, facials, things like that. But of course guilt has managed to prevail, and even though I live nowhere near my office in trendy Soho, I still know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that should I venture outside on the one day I’m pretending to be sick, someone from work will just happen to be at the end of my street.
So here I am. Watching dreadful daytime television on a cold January morning (although I did just manage to catch an item on “updos for weddings,” which may turn out to be incredibly useful), eating my way through a packet of custard creams (my last chance before the wedding diet goes into full acceleration), and wondering whether there would be any chance of finding a masseuse—a proper one—to come to the house at the last minute to soothe the knots of tension away.
I manage to waste forty-five minutes flicking through the small ads in the local magazines, but somehow I don’t think any of those masseuses are what I’m looking for: “guaranteed discretion,” “sensual and intimate.” And then I reach the personal ads at the back.
I smile to myself reading through. Of course I’m reading through. I may be about to get married but I’m still interested in seeing what’s out there, not that, I have to admit, I’ve ever actually gone down the personal-ad route. But I know a friend who has. Honestly.
And a wave of warmth, and yes, I’ll admit it, smugness, comes over me. I don’t ever have to tell anyone that I have a good sense of humor or that I look a bit like Renée Zellweger—but only if I pout and squint my eyes up very, very small—or that I love the requisite walks in the country and curling up by a log fire.
Not that any of that’s not true, but how lovely, how lucky am I, that I don’t ha
ve to explain myself, or describe myself, or pretend to be someone other than myself ever again.
Thank God for Dan. Thank you, God, for Dan. I slide my feet into huge fluffy slippers, scrape my hair back into a ponytail, and wrap Dan’s huge, voluminous toweling robe around me as I skate my way down the hallway to the kitchen.
Dan and Ellie. Ellie and Dan. Mrs. Dan Cooper. Mrs. Ellie Cooper. Ellie Cooper. I trill the words out, thrilling at how unfamiliar they sound, how they will be true in just over a month, how I got to have a fairy-tale ending after all.
And, despite the cloudy sky, the drizzle that seems to be omnipresent throughout this winter, I feel myself light up, as if the sun suddenly appeared at the living-room window specifically to shine its warmth upon me.
The problem with feeling guilty about pulling sickies, as I now discover, is that you end up too terrified to leave the house, and therefore waste the entire day. And of course the less you do, the less you want to do, so by two o’clock I’m bored, listless, and sleepy. Rather than taking the easy option and going back to bed, I decide to wake myself up with strong coffee, have a shower, and finally get dressed.
The cappuccino machine—an early wedding present from my chief executive—shouts a shiny hello from its corner on the kitchen worktop, by far the most glamorous and high-tech object in the kitchen, if not the entire flat. Were it not for Dan, I’d never use the bloody thing, and that’s despite a passion for strong, milky cappuccinos. Technology and I have never got on particularly well. The only technological area in which I excel is computers, but even then, now that all my junior colleagues are messing around with iPods and MPEGs and God knows what else, I’m beginning to be left behind there too.
My basic problem is not so much technology as paper: instruction manuals, to be specific. I just haven’t got the patience to read through them, and almost everything in my flat works eventually if I push a few buttons and hope for the best. Admittedly, my video recorder has never actually recorded anything, but I only ever bought the machine to play rented videos on, not to record, so as far as I’m concerned it has fulfilled its purpose admirably.
Actually, come to think of it, not quite everything has worked that perfectly: The freezer has spent the last year filled with ice and icicles, although I think that somewhere behind the ice may be a year-old carton of Ben & Jerry’s. And my Hoover still has the same dust bag it’s had since I bought it three years ago because I haven’t quite figured out how to change it—I cut a hole in it when it was full one time and hand-pulled all the dust out, then sealed it back up with tape and that seems to do the job wonderfully. If anything, just think how much money I’ve saved myself on Hoover bags.
Ah yes, there is also the superswish and superexpensive CD player that can take four hundred discs at a time, but has in fact only ever held one at a time.
So things may not work the way they’re supposed to, or in the way the manufacturers intended, but they work for me, and now I have Dan, Dan who will not lay a finger on any new purchase until he has read the instruction manual cover to cover, until he has ingested even the smallest of the small print, until he can recite the manual from memory alone.
And so Dan—bless him—now reads the manuals, and gives me demonstrations on how things like Hoovers, tumble dryers, and cappuccino machines work. The only saving grace to this, other than now being able to work the cappuccino machine, is that Dan has learned to fine-tune his demonstrations so they last no longer than one minute, by which time I’ll have completely tuned out and will be thinking either about new presentations at work, or possibly dreaming about floating on a desert island during our honeymoon.
But the cappuccino machine, I have to say, is brilliant, and God, am I happy I actually paid attention when Dan was showing me how it worked. It arrived three days ago, and thus far I’ve used it nine times. Two cups in the morning before leaving for work, one cup when I get home, and one, or two, in the evening after dinner, although after 8:00 P.M. we both switch to decaf.
And as I’m tapping the coffee grains into the spoon to start making the coffee, I find myself thinking about spending the rest of my life with only one person.
I should feel scared. Apprehensive at the very least. But all I feel is pure, unadulterated joy.
Any doubts I may have about this wedding, about getting married, about spending the rest of my life with Dan have nothing whatsoever to do with Dan.
And everything to do with his mother.
2
—There were three of us in this marriage…
I remember watching Princess Diana roll those huge sad eyes as she looked up at the camera and said those now infamous words, and I wondered what on earth she was talking about, wondered just how she managed to be so unbelievably dramatic.
And now, weeks away from my own wedding, I know exactly what she meant, the only difference being that I’m dealing not with a mistress but with a matriarch.
Frankly, I can’t decide which is worse.
I met Dan, fell in love with Dan, and agreed to marry Dan thinking I was marrying, well, Dan, but as the months of preparation have unfolded, I’m beginning to see that I’m marrying Dan, his mother, and on a slightly less intense level, his father, brother, and sister.
Don’t get me wrong. For a while I was completely over the moon about this. In the beginning, when we first met and Dan introduced me to his family, I was thrilled. Thrilled to have found the family I’d always dreamed of. A warm, large, and loving family, brothers and sisters, parents who were still together and happy.
When Dan confessed on our third date that he went to his parents for lunch every Sunday, I made up my mind there and then that he was going to be The One. A boy who still loves his family, I thought. A family so close they get together every week. What more could a girl ask for?
With hindsight, I was bound to think that, given that my own dysfunctional family had fallen to pieces right around the time my mother died.
Not that it was the happiest of families that was destroyed. My mother was an alcoholic: unpredictable, manipulative, self-obsessed. When sober she had the capacity to be exactly the mother I wanted. She could be kind, warm, loving, fun. I remember how much I adored her when I was very young, how she’d take me to puppet shows, laugh delightedly when I giggled at Punch and Judy, scoop me up into her arms while I wriggled and then cover me with kisses.
But she wasn’t often sober. My mother and father were forever hosting cocktail parties, forever finding excuses to drink. I’d hear the music and laughter, and would leave my bedroom and sit on the top step of the stairs, trying to see the glamorous evening dresses without being seen.
Then, in the beginning, she was wonderful when she was drunk. “I’m not drunk,” she’d laugh, “just a tiny bit tipsy.” But her personality became huge when she was drunk, her happiness magnified a thousandfold by the alcohol. More affectionate, more vibrant, just more.
But as the drinking progressed, things changed. Her happiness turned to disappointment, disgust, disease, and the alcohol continued to increase it. Where once she had been fun, she became sullen; where she had been loving, she became distant; where she had once covered me with kisses, she attacked me with insults.
In time, my father withdrew from both of us. He’d try to talk to her but it would end in a screaming match, so he’d grab his coat and go out, for hours at a time, sometimes all night.
I learned to read the signs, know when she had been drinking, know when to stay away. My friends were few and far between, but they were loyal, and understood when I needed to stay the night, several nights a week.
I can’t say I was unhappy. Somewhere I was aware that my friends didn’t have mothers who were angels one minute then devils the next, and while I occasionally envied the stability and warmth I found in their homes, I never missed it in my own. It was, after all, the only home I knew.
On March 23, 1983, I was sitting next to my best friend, Alison, in a history lesson. We were learning about the Fi
rst World War, and I had drifted away into a reverie involving me, Simon Le Bon, and true love. I’d just got to the part where he gazed into my eyes before the magical first kiss, when Alison nudged me sharply.
I looked at her to see her gesturing at the classroom door. Through the glass I could see the headmistress, Mrs. Dickinson, approaching, as did the rest of the class. A collective gasp went around the classroom, for Mrs. Dickinson was clearly about to come in, and, aside from morning assembly, Mrs. Dickinson was a formidable presence who was very definitely seen and not heard.
I’m sure she probably was a lovely woman, but the entire school was terrified of her. Even the sixthformers. She rarely seemed to smile and stalked around the school, steel-gray hair in a helmet around her face, head held high, staring into the middle distance with a terrifying gleam in her eye.
The entire class stopped breathing as we watched the door handle turn, and then she was in front of us, asking to have a word with Mrs. Packer, the history teacher. The two stepped outside and the class erupted, urgent whispers leaping across the room.
“Do you think someone’s in trouble?”
“Is she going to give out a detention?”
“What do you think she wants?”
“Maybe Mrs. Packer’s done something wrong?”
And then the door opened and the two women came back in, Mrs. Packer now looking as serious as Mrs. Dickinson, and even without looking at them I knew they were going to call my name, and I knew it was going to be terrible.
“Ellie?” Mrs. Packer said gently. “Mrs. Dickinson needs to talk to you.”
I felt all eyes upon me as I gathered up my books and walked to where Mrs. Dickinson was standing, and tried to ignore the gentle hand on my shoulder as she guided me out of the room and closed the door.
She didn’t say anything walking down the long corridor toward her office, and if I’d been older, or more confident, or less in awe of her, I would have stopped her and asked her to put me out of my misery, to tell me immediately what was going on, but I didn’t. I shuffled along next to her, looking at the ground, knowing that my life was about to change, but not quite knowing how.