The First Wife's Secret

Book excerpt: My father looks around the room and raises his glass of champagne high. 'Friends and family, I'm so glad you're all here today. Because there's something I've been wanting to share with you.' The way my stepmother's looking at him I can tell right away Dad's gone off-script. He looks out over us all and rubs his hand across his sweat-beaded forehead. He's shaking, I notice. And then he looks my way and his glance is absolutely piercing. That's what I'm thinking in the moment that his knees suddenly buckle and the glass drops from his hand. It smashes 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 in her childhood home for one stressful weekend. It's the twenty-five-year anniversary of her father's marriage to her stepmother. Those twenty-five years haven't all been happy ones for middle child Dinah, but she's getting ready to put the past behind her, keeping the bonds of family strong for her own daughter Josie's sake - until her beloved dad collapses in the middle of his anniversary speech. In the wake of her father's shocking cardiac arrest, youngest daughter Lottie Spencer must struggle to keep her family afloat. Her mother, the ever-capable Mara, suddenly seems disturbingly fragile. Then there are Lottie's two older step-sisters, Vaughan and Dinah, whose own private lives seem to be fraying at the seams. And then there's that mysterious box in the attic, belonging to her father's first wife. A box whose explosive secrets Lottie is only just starting to unravel... A heartbreaking, gripping page-turner about family secrets and the lengths we'll go to protect those we love. Fans of Jodi Picoult, Diane Chamberlaine and Liane Moriarty will be hooked.