Someone Else's Husband

The novel opens with an anonymous narrator reflecting on having killed someone, describing the act as born from fury rather than premeditation. The narrator has fled to a distant place with sparkling canals, but the horror of that night persists like a second heartbeat.

The story alternates between two timelines and perspectives. "After" chapters follow Gretchen Falk, the wife of Goldman Sachs managing director Richard Falk, in third person as she contends with the aftermath of her husband's arrest. "Before" chapters follow Frankie Callahan, a 39-year-old painter, in first person during the weeks leading up to the crime. Police interview transcripts, grand jury testimony, and italicized journal entries from an unidentified voice are interspersed throughout.

On September 12, police arrive at the Upper East Side co-op where Gretchen and Richard have raised their three children: Cassandra, Elizabeth, and Becks. Officers present a search warrant referencing the murder of Frankie Callahan, a woman from Richard's recent Kilimanjaro climbing expedition. Against attorney advice, Richard goes voluntarily to the precinct for questioning. In flashback, the novel traces their love story back to Dartmouth, where Gretchen, from a patrician wealthy family, fell for Richard, a scholarship student who grew up with a father who had an alcohol addiction and was abusive before abandoning the family. Their mutual friend Brooks Grace, Gretchen's closest companion since kindergarten, vouched for Richard.

Frankie's timeline begins on September 5, when she tells her best friend, psychiatrist Noah King, that she has agreed to see Richard again despite knowing he is married. They have been texting since returning from Africa, where one of Richard's friends, Van, a former NFL player turned restaurateur, died in a fall during the descent from Kilimanjaro's summit. In flashback, Frankie recalls arriving in Tanzania for the climb, which she undertook to celebrate her first major solo art show and to pursue a lifelong dream of climbing the seven summits, the highest peak on each of the seven continents. The group consisted of four men: Richard; Scotty Kaplan, a white-collar defense attorney and Richard's Dartmouth friend; Van; and Brooks, poised to become CEO of his family's company, Grace Chemical. Richard's warm handshake created an immediate connection.

Detective Raul Reyes informs Gretchen that an eyewitness and Richard's own statements have led to his arrest. Scotty arrives and insists whatever Richard said resulted from exhaustion and coercion. In a police transcript, Richard confirms he stayed friends with Frankie after the climb and is devastated to learn she was killed in what the detective describes as a crime of passion.

As Gretchen scrambles to manage the crisis, she confides in Hilary Kaplan, Scotty's wife and her closest friend, who casually reveals that people had long assumed Gretchen and Richard had some kind of open arrangement given his flirtatious nature. Gretchen is humiliated. Meanwhile, Frankie and Richard's connection deepens over the days that follow. They meet for coffee; he confides that his wife is emotionally unavailable around intense feelings. They later spend an evening at Las Nacionales, the restaurant of Frankie's friend Thalia Perez. When they part at a subway entrance, Frankie forces herself to walk away. Richard calls after her, his voice breaking.

At the same time, Frankie begins receiving threatening texts from a 508 (Massachusetts) area code. She believes they are from Senator Adam Foley. When Frankie was 17, Foley sexually assaulted her at a holiday party at Noah's parents' home in Georgetown. She subsequently signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) and accepted $450,000 in exchange for silence. The threatening texts escalate, including surveillance photos of her and Richard together, and someone breaks into her studio and destroys canvases with spray paint and a knife. The police tell her they cannot act quickly without imminent danger, and Scotty warns that any legal response could violate the NDA, which Frankie had burned.

Gretchen hires criminal defense attorney Mikey Pearce to represent Richard. At the arraignment, the prosecution charges murder in the first degree, alleging Richard impersonated a delivery person to enter Frankie's building and killed her in a jealous rage. The judge denies bail. Evidence mounts: bloody pants found with a bakery receipt bearing Gretchen's name; Richard's text to Frankie the night she died; and an eyewitness, deli owner Frederic Kostov, who identified Richard near the building with what appeared to be blood on his pants. A body recovered from the Hudson River is preliminarily identified as Frankie's.

A separate crisis emerges when a man connected to Ilya, Gretchen's Pilates instructor, confronts her. In flashback, Gretchen, after discovering a flirtatious text from Frankie on Richard's phone, had confided in Ilya, who connected her with associates hired to intimidate Frankie into staying away. The man now reveals that when his people arrived, Frankie was already dead, and he threatens Gretchen's children if their association is exposed. Gretchen sells Richard's Cartier watch, which she learns was originally intended for Frankie, and delivers $50,000 in cash at Bethesda Fountain.

Frankie's final "Before" chapters reveal the events of September 10. After someone breaks into her apartment, she flees to Richard's home. There, Richard voices suspicion that Brooks, financially desperate and recently fired, may have pushed Van during the fatal fall. In the powder room, Frankie discovers cans of neon spray paint in a Goldman Sachs duffel bag, the same colors used to destroy her studio. Shaken, she flees. The true vandal, however, is Becks, the Falks' youngest son, who followed his father to the coffee meeting with Frankie and later returned to her studio with his friend Luke, a graffiti artist, to destroy the paintings.

That night, Brooks enters Frankie's apartment. He has been in New York for weeks, staying at the Plaza Hotel, following Gretchen obsessively and recording her movements in a journal. The italicized entries throughout the novel are his. He impersonated the Senator via texts, using knowledge of Frankie's NDA that Foley had drunkenly confided when they were colleagues at the law firm Sinclair, Williams. Brooks demands that Frankie call Gretchen and claim she slept with Richard, hoping to destroy the marriage. When Frankie asks if he pushed Van off the mountain, Brooks does not deny it. Frankie tries to run; Brooks tackles her. In the struggle, she slashes his neck with a paint scraper knife.

In a police interview, detectives threaten to investigate Gretchen for the murder. To protect his wife, Richard declares, "Then arrest me." He later reveals he went to Frankie's apartment that night, found blood everywhere but no body, and tried to clean up, believing Gretchen might be responsible because of the spray paint he found at home. This is how blood got on his pants.

The case reverses when DNA results reveal the blood in Frankie's apartment belongs to Brooks, not Frankie. The body from the Hudson is identified as Carole Rybak, a cleaning woman whose physical description caused the misidentification. Richard is released. A pre-scheduled email from Brooks, set to send automatically if he disappeared, surfaces, claiming Frankie was unstable. Frankie is charged with Brooks's murder and remains a fugitive. Richard pleads no contest to evidence tampering. In grand jury testimony, Noah repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment regarding Frankie's whereabouts.

The epilogue, set two years later, alternates between the two women. Gretchen, now separated from Richard and enrolled at NYU Law School, watches her granddaughter in Central Park. Richard, who served 18 months at Queensboro Correctional Facility, arrives to take over; Gretchen still feels a flutter, but it is now like a whisper or a ghost. Frankie narrates from the Venice Biennale, where her paintings are exhibited under a pseudonym. She reveals that Noah helped her bury Brooks's body in woodlands near Rhinebeck, New York, and that she fled to Amsterdam while police still believed she was dead. She has lived as a fugitive for two years, changing names every six months, painting prolifically. She acknowledges that killing Brooks, even in self-defense, will stay with her forever, but she has found freedom and the possibility of joy. The novel closes as Frankie steps out of the shadows into the light.