Ok so i just tore through no second chances, ex-husband and i need something to fill the hole it left. or honestly i just need to vent about it first because some of these scenes are still sitting in my chest.
The book opens with their five year old daughter elena in a pink dress she picked out two weeks ago for her birthday. she is sitting on the couch waiting for her dad. her little black shoes are swinging off the edge. she has this teddy bear her dad gave her when she was a baby. by 6:47pm he still has not shown up. the mom lauren tells the maid rosa to get elena into pajamas but elena won't take the dress off. she falls asleep in it, still holding the bear. when the husband ethan finally comes home it is the middle of the night and there is pink lipstick on his shirt collar. that entire opening chapter is just a slow knife.
The gaslighting is textbook. lauren asks about the lipstick and ethan goes "a coworker tripped and bumped into me." she pushes back and he hits her with "here we go again. you always jump to the worst conclusion." her best friend tessa sends her a news article with photos of ethan at a rooftop bar with a woman. the photo loads slowly on her phone. she recognizes his jawline first, then the curve of his ear. that slow loading on a phone screen is the worst kind of reveal.
It gets worse at his office. lauren brings a usb drive he needed and walks in on him with his college ex-girlfriend sofia. sofia looks lauren up and down and says "she's so plain. and you've gained a lot of weight." ethan just sits there. does not say one word in his wife's defense. then sofia drops the bomb: she is pregnant with ethan's baby. ethan stares at the floor. lauren walks out of the building and collapses on the street from the shock. a stranger catches her before she hits the ground.
The part that made me physically angry was chapter seven. it switches to ethan's point of view. lauren is lying in a hospital bed calling him over and over. six calls. he sees her name on the screen. he looks at it. and then he puts the phone face down on his desk because sofia is on her knees in front of him. the dual perspective is brutal. you go from lauren counting each unanswered call like another knife in her chest to ethan casually deciding she is not worth picking up for.
The stranger who caught her on the street paid her entire hospital bill and left without giving his name. the nurse tells lauren "he brought you in, waited while you were checked in, paid your bill, and then left." Tessa rushing to the hospital with her hair all messed up from driving fast, grabbing lauren's hands before even saying hello. that scene made me tear up more than the cheating reveal honestly. the friendship in this book carries so much weight.
And what got me at the end was lauren looking at herself in the hospital bathroom mirror, seeing how wrecked she looks, and then straightening her shoulders because "elena didn't need to see this version of me." she decides when she walks back into that house it will not be quiet. there is going to be a storm.
I keep thinking about how ethan's whole backstory is that sofia dumped him when his family went broke, and lauren was the one who stayed. she worked extra shifts so he could build his company. and the second he made it, he went right back to the woman who left him. something about that full circle just sits really heavy.
If anyone has read something with this same energy i would love recs. the slow build of discovering a betrayal, the dual pov that makes you want to throw things, the best friend who actually shows up. that is what i am looking for. this one just hit different. i keep coming back to the image of elena's little black shoes swinging off the couch edge while she waits for a dad who never shows up.
(ethan's pov in chapter 7 is brutal but the transition between the two perspectives is slightly abrupt, you adjust quickly though)
by Independent_Plum_489