The Housemaid's Secret

The Housemaid’s Secret is a thriller by medical doctor and bestselling author Freida McFadden. The novel is the second in a set of novels featuring a housemaid as the main character. This novel centers on Millie Calloway, a convicted felon who works for wealthy clients in Manhattan. After saving a friend from a potential rapist, Millie helps many other women escape their abusive partners. When she begins working for Douglas and Wendy Garrick, she recognizes the signs of abuse in Wendy and does what she can to help. However, things take a strange twist when Millie is accused of murder.

This guide refers to the Kindle e-book edition.

Content Warning: This guide discusses murder, suicide, and sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Wilhelmina “Millie” Calloway has recently lost her job and must find another one to pay her rent, but she has a felony conviction that limits her options. Millie gets a call from Douglas Garrick, the CEO of Coinstock. He tells Millie his wife has a health condition, and he wants to hire a housemaid to help her out. He hires Millie on the spot.

As Millie begins working for the Garricks, she notices odd things about their interactions. Wendy Garrick, Douglas’s wife, spends the majority of her time locked in the guest bedroom. Sometimes Millie can hear Wendy crying, other times she hears odd sounds when Douglas goes to check on Wendy, like crashing and raised voices. Millie begins to suspect Douglas is abusing Wendy. This is confirmed one day when Millie sees blood in the bathroom and threatens to call the police if Wendy doesn’t open the door. When she sees Wendy and the bruises on her face, Millie insists on doing something to help Wendy.

Millie was in prison because she accidentally killed a man who was trying to sexually assault her friend. When she got out, she helped her then-boyfriend, Enzo Accardi, arrange for battered women to leave their partners. Although Enzo is the one with the connections, Millie has some ideas of how to protect Wendy. She tells Wendy to find a friend Douglas knows nothing about and arrange to stay with them. The next day, Wendy tells Millie she found an old college friend, but she needs a ride to Albany to meet her. Millie agrees to rent a car and take her there. They make the drive, and Millie rents a motel room for Wendy in her own name, leaving her there alone.

A few days after leaving Wendy in Albany, Millie learns that Douglas found Wendy and brought her back to Manhattan. Wendy has decided that leaving Douglas is no longer an option. However, Wendy shows Millie a gun she discovered hidden in Douglas’s study. Wendy asks Millie to show her how to use the gun. Millie refuses, trying to convince Wendy that violence is not a way out. However, when Millie witnesses Douglas attempting to strangle Wendy days later, she retrieves the gun and uses it to kill Douglas. Wendy convinces Millie to leave the apartment, telling her that she will call the police and claim to have discovered Douglas’s body after returning to the apartment.

The next morning, Millie receives a visit from the police. She calls her boyfriend, Brock Cunningham, to act as her lawyer, but she hasn’t told him about her past and does so just before the detective questions her. When the detective begins showing Millie and Brock evidence that suggests Millie was having an affair with Douglas and that she killed him in a fit of rage when he tried to break off the relationship, Brock walks out of the interview. However, the police don’t have enough evidence against Millie to arrest her, and they let her go. At home, Millie sees a picture of Douglas Garrick on the television and realizes the man she shot was not Douglas Garrick.

Wendy reflects back on her relationship with Douglas Garrick, remembering how she intentionally ran into him at an art show and easily seduced him. A year after they met, Douglas and Wendy became engaged, and his lawyer pushed Wendy into signing a prenup that left her with 10 million dollars should they ever divorce. Shortly after the marriage, Douglas bought a home on Long Island. Wendy insisted on having a penthouse apartment in Manhattan as well. Two years into her marriage, Wendy was shopping for furniture to fill the apartment when she met Russell Simonds, the husband of Douglas’s secretary and a furniture salesman. Wendy and Russell began an affair that lasted 10 months. Douglas learned of the affair and canceled Wendy’s credit cards. When she confronted him, Douglas informed her she could divorce him, but she would walk away with nothing because of a clause in the prenup regarding infidelity.

Wendy plotted Douglas’s death, using Russell to pretend to be Douglas Garrick in order to trick Millie into believing the domestic abuse claim. Millie fell for every trick Wendy threw her way, even to the point of shooting Russell with a blank loaded into Wendy’s gun. After Millie left, Wendy called Douglas to the apartment to sign divorce papers. Russell was supposed to shoot Douglas as he came into the apartment, but Russell chickened out, so Wendy did it.

Millie remembers the day she drove Wendy to Albany, and how she ran into her ex-boyfriend, Enzo. She calls Enzo to provide her with an alibi and to help her figure out the identity of the stranger she shot in Wendy’s guest room. They discover the man’s name and learn about a cabin he owns a few hours away. At the same time, the police have discovered that there is a security camera on the back door of the Garricks’ apartment building that shows Wendy and Russell coming and going the day of the murder as well as Douglas’s arrival after Millie left the building.

Millie informs Russell’s wife about her husband’s infidelity and gives her a bottle of digoxin, a heart medication that both Brock and Douglas were prescribed. The wife, Marybeth, goes to the cabin, kills Russell, and makes Wendy write a suicide note. Marybeth then informs Wendy her wine was spiked with digoxin and that it will cause a fatal heart arrhythmia at high doses. Wendy’s death looks like a murder-suicide scene and the police close the case on Douglas’s murder based on the evidence and Wendy’s note. Millie happily goes on with her life and moves in with Enzo three months later.