The Truths We Hide Beneath the Layers We Share

If there’s one thing that nearly every person who bravely enters the romantic-relationship fray can bet on experiencing at some point, it’s the feeling of having their hearts broken… of being cast aside (for someone else? after the “new” wore off? because they drifted apart?), and losing whatever special bond they had (or thought they had) with another. (And sure, we’ve all heard the stories about those too-cute-for-words couples who met at pre-school, never dated anyone else, and lived happily-ever-after, but me, I view such tales as either urban legends or empirical evidence of magical unicorns.) Anyway, back to the rest of us… no matter whether straight, gay, young, old, experienced, or novice, the bottom line is always pretty much the same: being rejected hurts like hell.

How we handle it, though—what we do, how we cope—that’s where things really get interesting. And, in The Wife Between Us (by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen), we get a look at just how far some people might push the “coping” envelope.

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Vanessa used to “have it all”—certainly in the eyes of most people who knew her. A handsome, wealthy, and doting husband—Richard, her prince in a bespoke suit—who’d whisked her away from her former life, requesting that she quit her low-paying jobs (as a preschool teacher and a waitress) in New York City to move out to the beautiful house in the suburbs he surprised her with as a wedding present. Fancy dinners and soirees to attend, adorned with fabulous clothes, shoes, and jewelry. Plenty of free time to pursue her own interests. The possibility of starting a family. On the surface, it seemed like a fairy tale come to life.

Until several years later, when Richard’s eye wandered, that is… to his secretary Emma, herself a younger-by-a-decade carbon copy of Vanessa. And just like that, the dream was over. 

When we first actually see Vanessa, it’s clear she’s still struggling; she is working as a style consultant at a high-end department store (waiting on the very women she used to rub elbows with). She drinks too much (and tries desperately to hide it from the aunt who took her in). She’s depressed. She can think of little but the man of her dreams—her man—in the arms of the nubile replacement he’s now dating.  

Things don’t come to a head, though, until one day a customer—one of the women with whom she’d attended many of the same events—innocently (or not so innocently, perhaps) lets it slip, while trying on a designer dress, that Richard and Emma are getting married. Like a candle being snuffed, the tiny bit of normalcy Vanessa had been working so hard to achieve, dies.

Suddenly, her whole world becomes about making sure the wedding doesn’t take place, and she’ll do whatever it takes to prevent it.

But, here’s the thing: no one—not the cast-aside Vanessa, not the husband-who-decided-he-wanted-a-younger-model Richard, and not the fish-about-to-be-out-of-water Emma—is quite what she or he seems… nor do any of them behave as one might assume.

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Much like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train (both of which The Wife Between Us will inevitably be compared to), this story has as many layers as an onion… and I read it with equal measures of apprehension, suspense, and a sort of giddy delight as each layer was peeled—or ripped, at times—away to reveal what else lay just beneath. (I didn’t see much of it coming.)

Wonder of wonders, Hendricks and Pekkanen managed to come full circle by the last page, tying up all the loose ends in ways that actually made sense—quite a feat in something so elegantly complex. 

Psychological suspense, fear, relatable emotions (and not of the pretty variety, but the raw and real), and understandable actions (and reactions)… The Wife Between Us has it all. This is one hugely-satisfying read.  :)

~GlamKitty

Note: At the time of this review, The Wife Between Us is slated to come out early January, 2018.