The Husband's Secret

Cecilia is a wife, mother of three, and successful Tupperware consultant. To the community, she represents the pinnacle of achievement. This is an image she cares about and maintains through relentlessly efficient social and domestic management. Throughout much of the novel, Cecilia is consumed with the dilemma of whether to turn in John-Paul for the murder of Janie or keep his secret for the sake of their family. She finally tells Rachel the truth about her daughter’s death, but only after keeping the secret has resulted in Rachel severely injuring and maiming Cecilia’s daughter, Polly.

Cecilia and John-Paul ultimately accept their own guilt for playing a part in Polly’s accident, though, as Cecilia notes, their marriage is changed and wounded at its very core. She chooses to conceal her husband’s secret and ultimately places the blame almost equally on herself when that choice results in Polly’s accident. Cecilia—with her outer perfection and inner strife—offers an example of the argument that one should not judge a book by its cover.

Tess, like Cecilia, is a wife and a mother, but she’s the kind of woman who might envy Cecilia for her seeming ease of life. She’s secretly self-diagnosed herself with social anxiety before her husband and closest friend/cousin confess to her that they have been having an emotional affair. Motivated strictly by the desire to preserve her marriage for the sake of her son, Tess leaves, planning to return once Felicity and Will’s affair has become physical and lost its purity of feeling. As she ends up being the only one to consummate an affair, she finds that secret knowledge to be both comforting and humbling.

Tess, more than any of the other characters, is notable for her ability to reflect critically on her own behaviors and beliefs. Confronted with Felicity and Will’s affair, she notes her past treatment of the previously overweight Felicity, realizing she believed Felicity’s fat body rendered her incapable of having things like boyfriends, husbands, or children. More broadly, Tess comes to realize her ability to impact and hurt the people in her life. With these revelations, Tess begins to understand that she is not the center of every story, and that the people around her have complex desires and motivations of their own. 

Believing himself to have murdered Janie Crowley, John-Paul spends the next part of his life performing good citizenship. He is an excellent father and husband, though this form of service does not allow him to feel that he’s made up for what happened to Janie. Instead, he practices a form of self-denial, ceasing any activity that gives him pure, selfish pleasure. He ends the book in even more grief and guilt, blaming himself for the accident that cost his youngest daughter her arm. 

Connor ties Tess’s life into the knot of secrets and relationships that the three female protagonists have become entangled in. Though innocent of Janie’s murder, he serves to indicate the damage that even undeserved guilt can have on a person. Entirely innocent in both the murder of Janie Crowley and in Polly Fitzpatrick’s accident, Connor nevertheless feels culpable in subtle, but profoundly impactful, ways. 

Will, like John-Paul, is an excellent husband and father with a terrible secret. His emotional affair with Felicity turns out to have been a mid-life crisis, a response to his thinning hair and aging body. He is absent for most of the book and serves primarily as a site of entanglement and complication for Tess, though he does have dimension of his own.