The Husband's Secret

Tess and Connor have ridden his motorcycle to a beach and are drinking hot chocolate while sitting on a low brick wall. Tess is wearing a leather jacket Connor loaned her that smells like his aftershave. Her exhilaration from the ride has faded, and she feels awkward with the romance of the moment. She tries flirting but realizes it doesn’t feel authentic—she feels as though she’s trying to be “one of those sassy, feisty girls. Actually it was like she was trying to be Felicity and not doing a very good job of it” (330). They banter a bit about whether this is a second date and if that means last night was a first date, but Tess awkwardly defers the question.

Will says he went to therapy that afternoon, and Tess asks if he talked about her. He did, and Tess thinks about what she must seem like through the eyes of his therapist: “An ex-girlfriend who broke his heart suddenly reappears in his life when she’s right in the middle of a marriage crisis” (332). She feels defensive but tells herself that she’s been honest, she’s not leading him on, and maybe she could fall or even is falling in love with him. She thinks she’s a good person, then wonders if she actually is a good person. Does her shyness and social withdrawal make her a mean and selfish person? She thinks about how she and Felicity make fun of so many people and how they would make fun of people like Cecilia Fitzpatrick together.

Tess realizes that “when her life fell apart there hadn’t been one friend whom Tess could call. Not one friend. That’s why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a friend” (333). She says she fits his pattern of self-sabotaging relationships. She says she’s using him, she’s another wrong woman, and she’s terrible for him. He says he already knows she’s using him to help her not think about her husband, and then he kisses her “so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland” (333). 

This chapter takes place on April 6, 1984, the last day of Janie Crowley’s life. Janie has just met John-Paul at the park and told him that she is making things official with another guy. She had a vague idea about making it seem like the other guy (Connor) was making her break up with John-Paul, but now she wonders if it was a mistake to mention him at all. She could have blamed her father instead and spared John-Paul’s feelings, but a part of her wanted John-Paul “to know that she was in demand.”

John-Paul tells her he thought she was his girlfriend, and Janie is horrified. She flushes in sympathetic embarrassment and “[hears] herself giggle. A strange, high-pitched giggle. It was a terrible habit she had, of laughing when she was nervous, when she didn’t find anything funny about a particular situation” (335). It is this laugh that sets John-Paul off, thinking she’s laughing at him, and he lunges for her, grabbing her neck. She tries to convey with her eyes that there’s been a misunderstanding; she thinks she sees a change in his eyes and feels his hands loosening, but:

[…] there was something else happening; something very wrong and unfamiliar was happening to her body, and at that instant, a far-off part of her mind remembered that her mother had been going to pick her up from school today to take her to a doctor’s appointment (336).

She thinks “oh shit,” panics, and then dies.

Early on the morning of Good Friday, Rachel, Rob, Lauren, and Jacob go to Wattle Valley Park, where Janie’s body was found. Jacob wants juice and keeps asking for it, but Lauren reminds Jacob that they don’t drink juice because it’s bad for your teeth. Jacob gives Rachel a conspiratorial glance. Lauren asks if Rachel usually says anything, but Rachel says flatly that she just thinks of Janie. Lauren asks if Rob wants to say anything; Rachel almost answers no for him but stops herself. She sees Rob “looking up at the sky, stretching his neck out like a turkey, gritting those strong, white teeth, his hands awkwardly clenched across his stomach as if he were having a fit” (340). She realizes that she knows absolutely nothing about Rob’s own grief. She doesn’t know Lauren, and she doesn’t really know her own son.

Cecilia Fitzpatrick wakes late, at 9:30am, and reflects on how much she previously cherished Good Friday. It has been one of only two days in the year that the Fitzpatricks schedule no activities or events. From now on, however, she knows that Good Friday will always be tainted by the knowledge of John-Paul’s crime. When she starts to get up, John-Paul asks how they’d cope financially if he were to go to prison; he asks if they’d be able to keep the house. She says they’d be fine but doesn’t mention that she makes more money than he does. He talks sadly about all the preparations he’d have to make and what he’d miss in the girls’ lives, and he breaks down sobbing. Cecilia gathers him up like a child and comforts him. She realizes finally that she would never turn him in nor ask him to confess—not unless someone else was accused of the crime. 

Lucy, Tess, and Liam sit in the backyard eating hot cross buns with butter. Tess thinks about Connor and the sex they had the night before. Abruptly, Liam wants to know when Felicity and Will are coming for Easter; Tess doesn’t know how to answer the question. She thinks about having Connor over to play the boyfriend while Will and Felicity do their own thing. Connor texts, inviting Tess and Liam to fly a kite with him on the oval. He signs with xx, indicating two kisses. Tess says yes but agonizes over how many x’s to add to the end of her own text. She tells Liam to get dressed. As he runs into the house, Tess and Lucy think they hear the doorbell ring. Moments later, Liam appears at the screen door and flings it open with a “Ta-daaa!” and a beautiful blonde woman appears. It takes Tess a moment to realize that it’s Felicity.

Rachel goes back to Rob and Lauren’s place for coffee after the park. They were meant to go to a restaurant, but it was unexpectedly closed. Rachel briefly asks about the logistics of what they’ll do with their home and furniture while they’re in New York. Rob changes the subject by asking if Rachel dreams about Janie. She says she does and asks if he does, too. He says yes—that he has dreams in which he’s being strangled, and he wakes up choking for air; they’re worse around this time of year, so Lauren thought it might help to go to the park with Rachel. Rachel thinks again about how little she knows her son and how shallow their relationship is. When he was born, she remembers, she was “besotted” with him. She suddenly tells him, “You were the most beautiful baby. People used to stop me in the street to compliment me” (357). She realizes she’s never told Rob this; she’s spent so long trying to unearth new memories of Janie that she’s neglected those of her living son.

Lauren appears with hot cross buns. Rachel offers to help in the kitchen, but Lauren refuses, reminding Rachel that she never allows Lauren to help. Rachel feels as though she’s been exposed and realizes that not allowing Lauren to help was never about being a gracious host, but rather about expressing her dislike of her daughter-in-law. She wonders if Janie would have liked Lauren. She thinks about how she’s been imagining this parallel life for years—one in which Janie lived. Awash in emotion, she feels too weak to reach for her coffee. The chapter ends in Rachel’s self-reflection:

Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief and other times there was the anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now there was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heavy fog. She was just so damned sad (360).