The First Wife’s Secret

Description

My father looks around the room and raises his glass of champagne.

“I’m so glad everybody’s here today, because there’s something I’ve been wanting to share with you all.”

The way my stepmother’s looking at him, I can tell right away Dad’s gone off-script. He looks out over the sea of bodies and rubs his hand across his forehead. He’s shaking. And suddenly his knees buckle, and the glass drops from his hand like a grenade—an explosion of deafening silence.

My father is lying face-forward in the grass.

“Somebody call an ambulance,” a voice shrieks. And the world as I know it ends.

Dinah Spencer is back home for the twenty-fifth anniversary of her dad’s marriage to her stepmother when, in the middle of a startlingly unexpected speech, her beloved father collapses. In the days that follow, as their father lies unconscious in the hospital, Dinah and her half-sister Lottie must struggle to come to terms with their pasts . . . and an attic full of secrets.