The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie

Freida McFadden’s The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is a 2024 humorous novella that parodies the conventions of domestic thrillers. Protagonist Alice is simply trying to rebuild her everyday life after her husband Grant’s death. When she begins seeing a man watching her in various spots around town, she is understandably alarmed—especially since the man bears an uncanny resemblance to Grant. This mysterious figure is just one of several characters who may not be who they seem to be. The story’s numerous plot twists, cliffhangers, and red herrings good-naturedly parody stereotypical elements of popular domestic thrillers while still providing the exciting escape from the everyday world that serious thrillers promise. 

This study guide refers to the 2024 independently published paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of emotional abuse, graphic violence, and death.

Plot Summary

Alice Lockwood, a recent widow in her early thirties, has the unnerving experience of being watched at the drug store by a man that looks exactly like her dead husband, Grant. The man quickly disappears each time she catches sight of him, and she fears that she is losing her grip on reality. When she returns to her expensive and beautiful home—a home fully redecorated with the exception of a mysterious locked attic space that Grant forbade her from ever entering—she finds her best friend, Poppy, waiting with a casserole.

Alice dislikes casseroles, and she is tired of people bringing them over in the wake of Grant’s death. When she says she is not really hungry at the moment, Poppy makes her some tea—another thing she intensely dislikes. Alice does not tell Poppy about seeing Grant. Later, she thinks she sees the man peering in her window, but once again, he vanishes. She wishes that she were still working, so that she would have some kind of distraction from thoughts of Grant, but Grant pressured her into giving up her career years ago. In her closet, she notices the LED light she installed and thinks that it turned out not to be at all useful. She also notices a dress that she associates with her old life, before Grant’s death, and she resolves not to think about it anymore. Before turning in, she uses the bathroom. In the wastebasket is the test strip that she used a week previously to confirm her suspicion that she is pregnant.

After a breakfast served by Willie, the Lockwoods’ handsome housekeeper with a troubled past, Alice heads to the grocery store. She chooses some prenatal vitamins along with several other items and heads for the checkout. There, she runs into Grant’s secretary, Eliza, an nosy elderly woman who immediately sees the prenatal vitamins and begins asking questions. Panicked, Alice returns the vitamins to the shelf, pretending to have confused them with regular multivitamins. When she again sees the mysterious man who looks like Grant, she runs into the parking lot after him, but he is gone.

Back at home, Alice finally tells Poppy that she has been seeing Grant. Poppy thinks that grief and stress are causing Alice to hallucinate. The doorbell rings, and when Alice answers the door, she finds a woman she does not know waiting on the other side. The woman introduces herself as Marnie. She claims to also be Grant’s wife. She explains that it was not an official, legal marriage, and that is why she has come: she wants some of Grant’s estate to support her and Grant’s children.

Alice is stunned and at first refuses to believe Marnie’s story can be true, but Marnie shows her photos of Grant with her and one of their children. She suggests that Alice come to her house and meet the children, so that she can judge for herself whether the story is true.

At Marnie’s house, Alice meets her many children, who all look a lot like Grant. When one complains about being hungry, Alice agrees that, if they pass a DNA test, she will divide Grant’s estate with Marnie’s children. On her way home, she is followed by a green sedan. Once the driver—who looks just like Grant—is sure that Alice has seen him, he drives off. Alice drives to the cemetery to double-check that Grant’s grave is undisturbed. She knows the thought is irrational, but she is nonetheless pleased to see it intact. She is glad that Grant is dead, she says, because she is his killer.

The first part of her relationship with Grant was like a dream come true—for a while, they really were the perfect couple. About a year after they married, however, everything changed. A photo of a dress was circulating online, and people debated whether the dress was gold and white or blue and black. Grant insisted it was blue and black and became enraged when Alice said it looked white and gold. He became aggressive and verbally abusive, insisting that she was losing her mind and threatening to have her institutionalized. He replaced all of her clothes with blue-and-black dresses. Alice was frightened of him and horrified at what he had become.

She decided that she would never have children with Grant and that, to protect herself from him, she would have to kill him. Alice was unsuccessful in poisoning Grant or getting him to fall down the stairs, but she finally killed him by cutting the brakes in his car. Afterward, she threw away all of the blue-and-black dresses except one. She buried him in a white-and-gold casket.

When Alice returns home, Poppy is waiting. Alice tells her about her visit to Marnie’s and then finally shares with Poppy what was really happening in her marriage to Grant. She also admits to being pregnant. She is irritated that the LED lights she installed did not prevent her pregnancy. Poppy finally realizes that Alice has confused the acronyms “LED” and “IUD,” and she explains the difference.

After Poppy leaves, Detective Mancini stops by Alice’s house to talk about his investigation into Grant’s death. He reveals that the police have received a tip that Grant’s brakes were tampered with but admits that the car has been scrapped and they have no way of verifying the tip. He asks whether Grant had any enemies, and Alice tells him that Grant never trusted Willie. She is disappointed to hear that Willie has an alibi for the day of Grant’s death, because she deliberately hired Willie—a man with a prison record—in order to have a scapegoat for Grant’s death. Before Mancini leaves, he shows Alice a photo of the inside of Grant’s car and asks her what color the dress in the photo is. When she says white and gold, he is skeptical, saying that he believes it to be blue and black.

Now suffering from a headache, Alice opens one of Grant’s prescription painkiller bottles. Inside is a key to the attic room. Alice is excited and terrified at the idea of finally finding out what is making the noises she always hears coming from the mysterious room. When she finally opens the attic door, however, she finds nothing but a cat riding a Roomba and a notebook in which Grant has been writing a terrible fantasy novel.

Disappointed, Alice takes the casseroles from her refrigerator and puts them in her car’s trunk, meaning to take them to Marnie. She hears a rustling in a nearby hedge and grabs a shovel from the trunk, demanding that whomever is inside the hedge come out. When the man emerges, he looks just like Grant—but he says that he is Grant’s twin, Brant.

Alice does not believe him, because Grant told her he was an only child. The man shows her a photo of himself and Grant as children, and Alice realizes that there is one small difference between the two—Brant has a small mole in front of his right ear. She also realizes that the existence of an identical twin would explain Marnie’s belief that she was married to Grant: Brant is actually Marnie’s partner, not Grant. Brant admits that he lied to Marnie about his identity. When he found out about Grant’s death, he seized the opportunity to make Marnie believe that he had died, because his and Marnie’s relationship had become irredeemably broken over her refusal to agree with him that Nickelback is a great band. Alice, who loves Nickelback, invites Brant inside.

As Brant and Alice talk, they realize that they have many surprising things in common—things that they did not have in common with Marnie or Grant. They agree to have dinner together later, and before Brant leaves, he kisses Alice. Alice decides to talk to Poppy about whether she should or should not trust Brant—but when she goes next door to Poppy’s house, an elderly woman answers the door and claims that Poppy does not live there. She tells Alice that someone named Poppy once lived in the house, but that she died in a terrible fire decades ago. Alice decides that she must have made Poppy up in her own mind as a source of comfort during her stressful marriage. She eagerly awaits Brant’s return, thinking that he will help her feel less alone.

When Brant returns, he asks whether he can change clothes, as he has been wearing the same outfit for two weeks now. He comes back downstairs wearing one of Grant’s fancy suits, and Alice is disconcerted by how identical to Grant he now looks. He gives her a gift-wrapped box. To her horror, the present inside is a blue-and-black dress. When he wipes away the pretend mole on his cheek, Alice realizes that the man in front of her really is Grant.

Grant explains that he saw Alice tamper with his brakes and gave the car to his twin brother, Brant. It was Brant who died in the crash, and Grant says that if Alice does not obey his every command from now on, he will have Alice arrested. Then he decides to kill her instead. As he approaches her, intending to strangle her with the blue-and-black dress, Poppy enters the room and knocks him unconscious with a shovel.

Once Poppy finally convinces Alice that she is real, not a hallucination, Alice realizes that she simply went to the wrong house when she was looking for Alice earlier. Grant begins to stir, and Alice hits him over and over with the shovel until she is sure he is dead. Alice and Poppy bury Grant in the backyard. Alice stashes Grant’s wallet in a drawer, intending to burn the clothes he came back to the house in.

Poppy takes a shower to get rid of the dirt and blood before she goes home to her husband. While she is in the bathroom, she discovers Alice’s “pregnancy” test and angrily informs Alice that it is a COVID test. Alice is not pregnant after all, and she has likely infected Poppy with COVID. Alice sees a news alert that Detective Mancini has been killed while responding to a robbery call, and she is relieved that the investigation of Grant’s death will likely end.

The next morning, Alice awakes to the disconcerting realization that there is someone in her shower. She opens the shower door to see her husband; he greets her nonchalantly. Horrified, she retrieves the wallet from the drawer in her bedroom and finds the photograph of Brant and Grant. When she unfolds it, she realizes that they were not identical twins: there is a third child in the picture, making them identical triplets.