60 pages • 2 hours read
Mary KubicaThe Other Mrs.
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 174-232Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 174-192 Summary: “Sadie”
Sadie returns home while Will and Otto are at the Lego event. Imogen has installed a lock on her door to prevent Sadie from snooping in her room again. After saying hello to Otto, Sadie notices that a light is on in the attic. This is where Alice died, and the children have been told to stay out.
Sadie acknowledges her bad memory, then remembers her terrible roommate, Camille, who used to wear her clothes and return them wrinkled and reeking of cigarette smoke. She also snooped through Sadie’s things, even after she moved out. Sadie wonders now whether she imagined this.
She also remembers meeting Will at the engagement party and how he used a “cheesy” pick-up line: “Hey there. I think I’ve seen you before” (179). She recalls all the terrible things leading up to their move from Chicago, including new details about the ER incident that led to her resignation. She left in the middle of a medical procedure and was found on the roof by colleagues, who were convinced she was going to attempt suicide. She chose to resign rather than undergo psychiatric evaluation.
In the attic Sadie finds Otto’s expensive pencils and some drawings, but they are violent and disturbing images rather than Otto’s usual anime. Along with the images, a violent scene has been staged in the dollhouse. Sadie confronts Imogen and asks if she went into the attic. Imogen responds by showing Sadie a picture of Alice hanging from a noose, which she took shortly after her suicide. Sadie notices that the stool used to reach the noose is standing upright, four feet away from the body.
Tate and Will return, and Tate is excited that Sadie visited him at school earlier that day. Sadie denies it was her. She thinks Imogen is responsible for the drawings, but Will suggests that it is Otto. Sadie is concerned that the murderer might be living in the empty house next door.
Pages 193-197 Summary: “Camille”
Camille picks up the narrative where Sadie left off remembering in the previous section, during Will and Sadie’s early relationship. Camille spies on the couple and is sleeping with Will herself. When encouraged by her psychiatrist to leave him because has no incentive to end their affair, she misinterprets the advice to mean Will will never leave her.
Pages 198-209 Summary: “Sadie”
Sadie dreams of a room that she does not recognize. Her fear of Imogen seems to be growing. The picture of Erin is no longer in the book Will is reading, but thinking of her leads Sadie to remember the story of Erin’s death. Erin’s car skidded off the road into a lake, where she drowned. Even though this happened decades earlier, Sadie is still jealous of Erin and insecure that Will does not really love her.
Sadie decides to go for a jog along the cliffs, where she hallucinates that someone is saying: “I hate you. You’re a loser. Die, die, die” (205). She convinces herself that she imagined it, that it was only the wind. She stops in a shop to get out of the rain, and local women are gossiping about the new details of Morgan’s death. She was stabbed five times, including in the face. As a doctor, Sadie thinks that it could have been done with a boning knife.
Pages 210-218 Summary: “Camille”
Camille’s narrative is no longer a flashback; she followed Will to the island in Maine and is staying in the empty house next door to the Foust family. She freely roams in Sadie’s house, as she has figured out the security codes and does not alarm the dogs. She has been busy at the house, upgrading their cable service, causing the gas leak, and scratching the word DIE into Sadie’s car window. Camille likes wearing Alice’s old brown sweater, which Sadie thinks she has misplaced, and pretending to be Mrs. Foust. She is always careful to leave before Will returns home. She visits Will at the university, and he is surprised yet pleased to see her.
Pages 219-232 Summary: “Sadie”
Sadie jogs home from the fish store and arrives on her street in time to see Officer Berg place a mysterious envelope in the Nilssons’ mailbox for a second time. She opens the envelope and finds it full of cash.
At home, she steps on a doll in the house. She performs an internet search on boning knives and then sees that this very knife is missing from Will’s knife set in the kitchen. Her suspicions immediately go to Imogen. She decides to change the sheets and discovers a phone hidden under the mattress, which she plugs in to charge. She questions Will about the missing knife (which he easily justifies) and tells him about the suicide pictures on Imogen’s phone. Sadie realizes that the stool should have been knocked over beneath the body, making her wonder if it was suicide or murder. Her youngest son, Tate, asks her to play the statue game, but she has no idea what the game is. Tate calls her a liar. She goes back upstairs and is surprised to find that the linens have been stripped off the bed.
Pages 174-232 Analysis
This section of the story continues the rising action of the previous section. It adds details that make the severity and growing frequency of Sadie’s memory problems more apparent. It also suggests that Sadie is in denial about her strange behavior, memory lapses, and missing blocks of time. Denial is often a key component of DID, since the condition is often triggered by a person’s inability to process a traumatic event. Along with denial comes self-doubt, which Sadie describes as “paranoia” in the text. This lack of certainty makes a person with DID very vulnerable to manipulation by others. Both Sadie and Camille exhibit moments of denial, hinting at their connection. Camille “denies” recognizing that she and Sadie are the same person and instead states that she can pass as Sadie. Sadie denies that she has more serious problems than a “nervous breakdown” and refuses to seek psychiatric help. When she cannot remember something, she denies it, and this results in her children feeling abandoned and lied to by their mother. The text drops more evidence of Sadie’s increasing psychological instability; her time and memory loss become more explicit, and auditory hallucinations while jogging reinforce her unreliability as a narrator.
Sadie’s self-doubt is fueled by both her DID and Will’s constant gaslighting; while the truth of his character has yet to be revealed, his actions in these chapters allude to this. When Sadie expresses concern about Imogen’s behavior, Will dismisses it or introduces another possibility, blaming Otto for the violent images instead. It is not clear if Will knows who is really responsible for the images, but he consistently causes Sadie to doubt herself by introducing other possibilities or by outright lying to her, as he does about the boning knife. These actions are contextualized by Camille’s flashbacks, where Will is shown to cheat.
The murder-mystery element of the story also advances in this section, with suspicion focused at various moments on Imogen, Otto, Officer Berg, and now Camille, who has reentered their lives in the present. The images in Camille’s section have double meanings. While her stealing Sadie’s cardigan suggests an obsession, it really alludes to their shared identity. Likewise, Camille thinks of herself as Mrs. Foust, suggesting a desire to take Sadie’s place. However, this detail also hints that she and Sadie are the same person; she truly is Mrs. Foust. At this point in the narrative, Camille is a wild card who has shown herself capable of dangerous and unpredictable behavior in the past.
The other suspects also bear mystery-genre hallmarks. Imogen and Otto are both troubled teenagers with past traumas that might trigger violent behavior. Imogen found her mother’s dead body, and Otto took a knife to school to defend himself from bullying. Officer Berg has been giving money to the Nilssons, which Sadie thinks may be a bribe to give false testimony against her. Imogen’s photos of her mother’s death hint that she did not simply die by suicide. This introduction of an additional crime heightens the tension and increases the narrative momentum toward the climax.
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By Mary Kubica
