The Diary of an Unloved Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Man Across the Square
Five years after Winslow Endicott took his runaway brother's place at the altar, he carries his girlfriend out of a gas fire and leaves his wife on the floor, and Margery wakes in hospital to learn the girlfriend is her housekeeper's daughter; she accepts a place in New York, and at three in the morning finds Winslow in the dark holding her phone.
When my father died, he left me no money at all.
He left me a house on Louisburg Square and a letter to his oldest friends, the Endicotts.
The letter asked them to see me married to one of their two sons.
He wanted the elder one.
Everyone knew it, including me.
The night before the wedding, the elder son ran off with our housekeeper's daughter, Colleen.
At nine the next morning, his younger brother, Winslow, stood at the altar in his place.
Nobody asked me what I wanted.
That night I hid on the balcony of the bridal suite in my slip and cried for my father.
Winslow kicked the door open behind me.
He was still in his tuxedo, the tie pulled loose, a glass in his hand.
He looked at my wet face and smiled with half his mouth.
"Is it really that bad, being married to me instead of him?"
I didn't answer.
He shut the door and went to sleep in the other room.
He slept in the other room for the next five years.
He also brought a different woman home almost every week.
One was a cellist, one a realtor, one somebody's divorced aunt from Wellesley.
I poured them coffee in the morning and asked how they took it.
I was a good wife. I ran his house and smiled at his parents' table.
And quietly, I asked our housekeeper, Moira Hanlon, to find out who each woman was.
Moira knew every housekeeper in Boston.
If a woman was after the Endicott money, I wanted to know before she got near it.
None of them were.
None of them stayed, either.
Until the little platinum blonde called Keira.
Keira had been in my house for four months.
On the second Sunday of December she sat in my kitchen in Winslow's shirt and nothing else.
She wound her arm through his and looked at me over her mug.
"Winslow, your wife looks a little upset."
Winslow glanced at me.
Then he laughed through his nose.
"My wife? She doesn't want to be my wife."
He tipped his head at the window, toward the dark shuttered house on the other side of the square.
"She wants the man who used to live over there."
That was his brother's house.
It had been empty for five years.
I went up to bed without a word.
At two in the morning a gas line behind the stove gave way.
I woke to the alarm and a red light under my door.
The back stairs were already burning, so I went for the front.
The smoke was so thick in the hall I could taste it.
Winslow came out of his room with Keira in his arms.
She was coughing and clinging to his neck.
I was on my knees at the top of the stairs.
I said his name.
He looked straight at me.
Then he carried her down past me and out the front door into the snow.
He didn't come back.
My arms stopped working, and then my legs.
I lay on the floor of my father's house and watched the door he'd left open.
Something in me went very quiet.
If I lived through this, I was going to end my marriage.
I don't know who carried me out.
I remember sirens, and a man shouting in the street.
I remember Winslow's voice in the cold, telling Keira she was safe.
I listened for my own name in his mouth.
It never came.
I woke up in Mass General with my right arm wrapped from wrist to elbow.
The room was quiet except for the monitor.
Winslow wasn't there.
Moira was.
She came through the door with her reading glasses swinging on their chain.
She'd kept house for my family for twenty years, since I was eight.
My father's will had asked her to look after me.
"Margery. Oh, thank God, you're awake."
She helped me sit up and tucked the blanket around my arm.
I didn't ask where my husband was.
"Find out who Keira is," I said. "Same as the others."
Moira didn't answer.
Then her knees gave out and she slid down the side of the bed to the floor.
She held the sheet in both fists and sobbed into it.
"It's my fault. I didn't raise her right."
I stared at the top of her grey head.
"Keira is your daughter?"
She nodded without looking up.
I hadn't seen Moira's younger girl since she was twelve.
Moira had sent both her girls to her sister in Worcester after that.
The child I remembered had brown pigtails and a lisp.
"I've known since August," Moira whispered. "Please don't send me away, Margery."
I laughed.
It came out of me before I could stop it.
Then the door banged open.
Keira ran in, mascara down her cheeks.
Winslow came behind her.
"Mom, get up!" Keira grabbed her mother's arm. "Margery, punish me, not her!"
She reached for my bed.
Winslow caught her by the waist and pulled her back against his chest.
"What are you apologizing for? She's my wife on paper, that's all."
Keira sniffed. "There's one more thing, Margery. I should have told you."
She looked up at me through wet lashes.
"The girl who ran off with his brother was my sister."
Her eyes were shining.
They weren't sorry.
I smiled at her.
"Good. Then you and Colleen can keep each other company."
Keira's mouth opened and closed.
She pressed herself into Winslow's coat.
He still hadn't looked at me once.
He hadn't asked about my arm.
I didn't ask him why he'd walked past me on the stairs.
I turned to Moira on the floor.
"I'm not firing you," I said. "But I won't be paying you anymore."
Her face crumpled.
"From now on, you and your daughters can ask the Endicotts to provide for you."
That was when Winslow finally looked at me.
A line appeared between his eyebrows, and then it was gone.
I turned my face to the wall.
"Get out. All of you. I'm tired."
The door clicked shut behind them.
Only one person had ever known the truth about my wedding, and she'd run off with the groom.
My father had wanted the elder brother.
I had wanted Winslow since the summer I was nineteen.
I'd gotten exactly what I wanted, and look at it.
The wind threw sleet at the window.
I got up to close the blind.
Down in the hospital courtyard, Winslow was walking Keira through the bare garden.
She said something and he laughed.
He tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled at her, soft and easy.
He had never once smiled at me like that.
I let the blind fall.
The fever came back as I lay down, heavy behind my eyes.
My phone was on the tray table.
Four days ago, NYU had offered me a funded place in its history doctorate, starting in January.
I had left the email unanswered.
I opened it with my left thumb and pressed accept.
Then I let the dark take me.
When I woke again, it was three in the morning.
The only light in the room was the blue glow of a phone.
Winslow was sitting in the chair beside my bed.
He was holding my phone, lit up on the acceptance screen.
"New York?" he said softly.
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