leyendoconleti 's review for:

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen

3.0

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Warning: this review is full of spoilers. Read at your own risk.

I recognized marriage didn’t guarantee a storybook ending, the happily ever after stretching past the final page, the words echoing into infinity. But wasn’t this most intimate relationship supposed to be a safe place, where another person knew your secrets and faults and loved you anyway?

Me: I’m extremely confused.
Me to me: You’re confused? I’m fucking confused bro.

Basically these are my only thoughts regarding this book. No thoughts just this. Just what the actual fuck. So many good plot twists, this is why I love mistery/thrillers. I never know what is going to happen and just when I think I’m getting the hang of things, something completely out of the blue happens.

Then Richard spoke the words that would stay with her forever:
“Even when I’m not there, I’m always with you.”

At the beginning of this book I thought I was reading about a crazy wife who wanted to get back with her (at the time) verbally abusive husband. Who mistreated her and gaslighted her and she still wanted to be with him. I determined Vanessa was depressed, heartbroken and hurting for a man who from the very beginning wasn’t worth it. I thought, or rather, it was pointed out that Vanessa wanted Richard even though he cheated on her. Even though he made her feel crazy. I misjudged her and concluded she was a weak and broken little women who needed to grow a backbone. I assumed she was obsessed with her ex husband’s new girlfriend. Which, if you read the blurb of this book, assume was the only think you weren’t supposed to do.

I never made the connection that there could have been another reason why my nervous system became exquisitely heightened immediately after my engagement to Richard. Why I obsessively checked my locks, why I started getting hang-ups from blocked numbers, why I’d pushed Richard away so hard when my loving, sexy fiancé had held me down to tickle me on the night we watched Citizen Kane. The symptoms of arousal and fear can be muddled in the mind. I was wearing a blindfold after all.

By the middle the reader comes to realize that Nellie doesn’t exist, not anymore, and we’re just reading about Vanessa’s past and her and Richard’s “fairytale” romance. We don’t know who this new woman is. But we do know now why Vanessa’s and Richard’s relationship didn’t work and why she’s so desperate for this new woman to not marry Richard. Actually, for Ricard to not marry anyone, ever again. Because she doesn’t want these girls to suffer as she did. To suffer emotional and physical abuse as she did.

He just stared at me. He was capable of killing me. I had to convince him not to.

Reading about abuse always makes me feel so emotional, so depressed. This was truly horrible. Which was maybe the reason why I didn’t give it a higher rating. But by the end, Vanessa was able to get some peace, and that is all I wanted for her. Although, to see Richard suffer more would’ve been nice. I think he got off wayyy too easy, as cis white men tend to do. He should be in jail for what he did, but he got off with just a slap on the wrist.

I consider how perception has shaped the course of my own life; how I saw what I wanted to—needed to—during the years I was with Richard. Maybe being in love carries the requirement of filtered vision; perhaps it is so for everyone.

And those two final plot twists? Wow. Maureen really needs some help. If what I’m thinking is true, her and Richard really had a fuck up childhood to be so incredibly disturbed. Just no, to both of them. And Emma? Never in a million years would I have guessed she wasn’t another naive young girl falling for Richard’s trap.

[a:Greer Hendricks|16935182|Greer Hendricks|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1645555392p2/16935182.jpg] and [a:Sarah Pekkanen|2982045|Sarah Pekkanen|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1508184842p2/2982045.jpg] did such an amazing job with this. I’m so very excited to read more mystery/thriller from them.