The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they were on me.

Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be understanding. It’s getting hard to do.

They say that parents should know these things—what our kids are thinking—but we don’t. Not always. We can never really know what anyone else is thinking. And yet when children make poor choices, parents are the first to be blamed.

Suicide and murder are two very different things. But still, it’s unfathomable for me to think what these girls have seen in their short lives.

At the time, the sadness of Will losing a fiancée only attracted me to him more. Will was broken, like a butterfly without wings. I wanted to be the one to heal him.

Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.

What I’ve come to discover is that the island residents don’t take well to newcomers. Not unless you’re a child like Tate or gregarious like Will.

A man who is willing to cheat on his wife, she said, will often make promises to you that he can’t keep. When he tells you he loves you, it’s a form of entrapment. Cheating spouses are masters at manipulation, she said. He may tell you things to keep you from ending the affair. He has both a wife and a lover on the side. He has no incentive to change.

This woman tells me that she has reason to believe I suffer from dissociative identity disorder, that alternate personalities—alters, she calls them—control my thoughts, my behavior from time to time. She says that they control me.

I’ve got empathy down to a science. Eye contact, active listening. Ask questions, avoid judgment. I could do it in my sleep. It never hurts to cry a little, too.

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.