60 pages • 2 hours read
Mary KubicaThe Other Mrs.
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 65-112Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 65-75 Summary: “Sadie”
Sadie is nervous about the murder, so she compulsively checks the doors and windows. She cannot sleep and decides instead to check on the children; Tate and Otto are safely asleep, and Imogen is behind a locked door. Still too restless to sleep, she picks up Will’s book and finds a picture of his dead fiancée, Erin, tucked inside. Sadie wonders how she can be jealous of a dead woman but then remembers Erin’s breathtaking beauty and how Sadie was Will’s second choice.
Sadie goes to the backyard because the dogs are barking, and she becomes frightened at the thought that the murderer might be there. She lures the dogs back into the house with treats. Imogen’s door is now open, and she is sleeping inside, but it is cold in her room. Will wakes up and tries to convince Sadie that it is probably coyotes that are causing the dogs to bark.
Pages 76-87 Summary: “Sadie”
Sadie drops Otto at the ferry the next morning and sees that he goes on deck and stands alone in the rain. Officer Berg is waiting at the ferry station to talk to her, and she learns more about the murder investigation. Threatening notes had been found in the Baines house, and the audio clip of the 911 call was released. In it, the six-year-old child who found the body calls Morgan by her first name, which Sadie finds strange. Will later tells Sadie it is because Morgan was the child’s stepmother; Jeffrey had been married before.
More clues are dropped by Officer Berg. For example, Morgan’s phone is missing. The Nilssons gave taped testimony to the police that they saw Sadie engaged in a physical altercation with the now-murdered woman, but Sadie never met Morgan; she knows for sure because she doesn’t recognize her picture in the newspaper.
Pages 88-91 Summary: “Mouse”
A new narrator is introduced. Her name is Mouse, and she is a six-year-old child. Unlike Sadie and Camille, whose entries use the first-person narrative, Mouse’s entries are told in the third-person limited perspective; only her point of view and knowledge are shared. She is an imaginative child and loves to spend time with her father, who gave her the nickname Mouse. She loves to eat Salerno Butter Cookies with her father and play imaginative games like hot lava with Mr. Bear and her dolls. It is not entirely clear to her why he calls her Mouse, but she loves the nickname, at least until his second wife, Fake Mom, comes along.
Pages 92-112 Summary: “Sadie”
This section of Sadie’s narrative opens with her on the floor in her office’s waiting room playing with a small girl who is a patient. She has no idea what game they are playing, and when her coworker Joyce sees her, she has no idea why she thought it would be a good idea to get on the floor and play.
Sadie knows Joyce does not like her but rationalizes that it cannot be because of what happened in Chicago, which was “a blot on [her] confidence, if not on [her] résumé” (95); she chose to resign and save her medical career. She thinks that she is running late or the receptionist overscheduled appointments, but it is becoming clear that she is “missing time.”
The rest of this section reinforces that something is wrong with Sadie’s memory, as she has no or only partial memories of many things in her life. For example, she does not know the “statue game” Tate insists they have played together or remember telling the hairdresser to cut her hair so short. Perhaps most importantly, she does not remember Otto telling her about being bullied or that she put a knife in his book bag. Sadie repeats Will’s explanations for events in their lives as “happenstance” (111), but she wonders “if bad luck is destined to follow [them] wherever [they] go” (112).
Pages 65-112 Analysis
The rising action begins with Sadie becoming nervous about the murderer on the loose. She is also upset by finding the picture of Will’s long-deceased fiancée, Erin, unsure why he is keeping a picture of her in a book. It is later revealed that this is a clue Morgan left before she was murdered, to warn Sadie about Will’s past. Sadie misinterprets it as a sign that Will was still carrying a torch for Erin; this detail reveals that their marriage involves mistrust and a lack of communication, foreshadowing Will’s true nature.
Sadie’s encounter with the police officer not only provides clues about the murder (the threatening notes, Jeffrey’s first marriage, the family photo, the missing phone) but also reveals that Sadie herself is a suspect. Unreliable narration creates tension and raises questions; the Nilssons’ testimony about Sadie fighting with Morgan, to the extent that Sadie ripped out handfuls of Morgan’s hair, is confusing to Sadie and the reader because both learn it from an outside perspective. Sadie’s narration makes this seem so out of character that it appears to be a red herring, but it turns out to be an important piece of evidence against the real murderer. At this point, the reader does not know that Sadie is unreliable, but the mismatch between her memories and the testimony foreshadows the reveal.
The introduction of Mouse as another narrative voice will help fill in an important element of the larger picture concerning Sadie’s past, although, at this time, Mouse’s identity is ambiguous. Some readers might think she is Morgan’s unnamed stepdaughter, as they are the same age, creating another red herring. Her real identity as one of Sadie’s alternate personalities is made clear by the end of the story. The trauma that Mouse suffers as a child likely caused Sadie’s splitting or dissociating into three personalities. Mouse’s narratives are told in the third person, which prevents the reader from getting close to her in the same way that Sadie’s or Camille’s first-person narrations allow. This might be because the trauma she endured at the hands of her abusive stepmother caused her to withdraw to protect herself, or it might be because, as a small child, she is not capable of expressing herself. She needs her story to be told for her. Mouse’s narratives begin with fairy-tale motifs: “[O]nce upon a time there was a girl named Mouse” (88). This creates even more distance between the Mouse persona and the reader because it makes her seem unreal. The end of this section foreshadows the dangers Mouse will face with the introduction of Fake Mom. Her dislike of Fake Mom gives the red herring more legitimacy, as Morgan was a stepmother, and tensions between stepparents and stepchildren are stereotypically volatile.
Introducing Mouse hints at the significance of Sadie playing on the floor in the clinic, and the vigilant reader might begin to make connections between Sadie and this alternate personality. The time and memory loss Sadie experiences reveal that she is an unreliable narrator and hint that she is experiencing delusions and might have a mental-health condition. This is strengthened by allusions to her yet-unnamed crisis in Chicago.
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By Mary Kubica
