The End of Her

by Shari Lapena

There’s a pair of four-month-old twins with a really nice mom—Stephanie—directly across the street whom Hanna’s become friends with. This woman looks to be alone—no husband or kids in tow.

Now, Stephanie is astonished at how naive she was before the birth. Control is an illusion.

One thing Stephanie’s learned as a first-time mother is that timing is everything.

It’s hard to be social when you’re exhausted.

She gets this a lot, especially with twins, but no woman ever tires of hearing some stranger tell her how adorable her kids are.

“So ask yourself—If Patrick didn’t kill her deliberately, and it was just a horrible accident, and I was carrying his child, why did I stay away from him all this time?”

“Because some men use wives like ATMs,” Erica says. “And I saw that you were going to inherit quite a lot of money.”

“It makes all the difference in the world,” she exclaims. “It looks like you married her because you had to, not because you wanted to.

When trust goes, how quickly love disappears and self-preservation takes over.

She’s so frightened that Erica will find out what she and Niall have been hiding for the last six years.

“Bullshit! I didn’t try to run you down! Just stop with the fucking lies, can’t you? You didn’t give me enough time. I needed to be sure I wouldn’t get caught. Now, thanks to you, I can never get rid of Stephanie—and it’s all your fault—going to the fucking police! You’ve screwed us both.”

By the time he decided it would be a much better idea to get rid of Erica—the source of all his problems—she’d already gone to the coroner. He’d always planned to get rid of Stephanie someday, somehow—but Erica had forced his hand.

There are so many of them. Angry, thwarted men who kill their wives and children.

“I came into a large inheritance on my last birthday. He doesn’t have any rights to that, does he?” “None at all. In New York, inherited property does not go into marital assets to be divided when a marriage ends.