Trad Widow

The following is an excerpt from Trad Widow, a comedic murder mystery available in paperback and ebook here.

Trad Widow

Chapter One: Hospital Corners

I’ve been making the bed for two hours, but the sheets still look messy on video. I pause my recording to scream as I rip the fitted sheet from the mattress so I can put it on again for the fifteenth time.

Usually, I don’t let commenters get to me, but yesterday was different. I posted a “Day in the Life of a Trad Wife” video in which I floated through my routine dressed in a floral nap dress. I did my morning skincare and makeup, made the bed, cooked breakfast for my husband Caleb, cleaned the bathroom, shopped for groceries, went to the gym, did laundry, and made dinner. In the voiceover, I explained my lifestyle as a traditional wife who stays home to serve her husband.

Most of the negative comments didn’t get to me because they were so silly, stuff like Please don’t include me in your fetish and You’re setting feminism back. The ones that said bed looks like shit and bitch cant make a bed bothered me, though. No one ever taught me how to make a bed. Back when I lived with Mom, she never made me do chores and didn’t make her own bed. I learned more life skills when I lived with Deb and Adam, but Deb believes in function over aesthetics. As long as the sheets were on and the pillows not on the floor, then it was good enough.

But good enough is not perfect, and my audience needs to know I’m the perfect wife. I grab my phone from where it’s propped up on my dresser filming me. I sit down on my bedroom rug and spread out my full skirt so I don’t wrinkle it as I look up a YouTube video on how to make a bed with perfect hospital corners.

The woman in the video is a bit condescending. She makes the hospital corners part clear, but only spends a second on putting the fitted sheet on the bed. Her mattress is thinner than mine, so she pulls the fitted sheet on easily.

When I stand up and try yet again to stretch the fitted sheet all the way on my mattress, it doesn’t work. I stretch it to its limits, but the corner pockets are not deep enough to go beneath the mattress. Instead, they threaten to spring off and leave an expanse of bare foam. I try to lift the mattress, but it’s too heavy. The mattress company Boink sent it to me for free as part of a paid promotion. It’s thick and dense, so lifting it feels like a two-person job. I let out a shriek and drive my fists into the bed. The memory foam layer absorbs my punches.

“Jesus…fucking…Christ,” I mutter through gritted teeth.

All the commenters think I’m an idiot. Right now, I agree with them. I don’t know why I can’t do the basic things other humans know how to do automatically. I want to rip apart this whole room and slash the pillows until feathers float through the air. But that would mean letting the negative commenters win. I take a deep breath. I need to call someone for help.

If I call Deb, she’ll say “Why does it have to be perfect? What, you want to live in a catalog?”

I sit down on my carpet and call Ashley, since she’s my only female friend. She picks up with her video on.

“Hey, Haven. Everything okay?” Ashley is in her car with some sort of purple iced drink in the cupholder. Her brown hair is in perfect waves, the type that’s only possible when you straighten your hair and then curl it again. She looks like she has a perfect life, though I know from Caleb that she and her husband Jed struggle with fertility and that she’s lost nearly a thousand dollars on a multi-level marketing scheme.

“Hey, Ashley. I have a dumb question.”

“Sure. What’s up?” She’s not looking directly at me, instead glancing in her rearview mirror as she changes lanes. The natural light through her windshield brings out the green in her eyes.

“How do you get a fitted sheet all the way on your mattress?” I’m blushing now. Ashley doesn’t know much about my childhood, so she probably assumes I’m some spoiled kid who never made the bed because my mom did everything for me. Though I consider her my closest friend, she doesn’t know me that well. In fact, she’s more of a friend-in-law. Ashley is married to Caleb’s best friend Jed. I’ve known her as long as I’ve known Caleb, which is almost two years now.

Ashley frowns. “I don’t know. I don’t really think about it, I just do it.”

I feel shame bloom inside me. I hate when things come easier to other people than they do for me. “The issue is that my mattress is so thick and heavy I can barely lift it.”

“You don’t have to lift the whole mattress all at once. Just lift one corner at a time and get the fitted sheet under that corner fully.”

“Alright, I’ll try. I really appreciate the help.”

“It’s no problem. Maybe sometime you could teach me how to edit video? I’ve been getting more into photography and I was thinking it would be cool to have a social media presence like you do.”

“Yeah, sure,” I tell her, though I’m not sure she has what it takes to be successful on TikTok or Instagram. Every pretty woman thinks she could be an influencer, but it takes a good eye and constant work. If you’re not a perfectionist, you’ll be eaten alive.

I say my goodbyes and hang up, then set up my phone camera for another take. I do what she says and it takes some wrestling, but I get the fitted sheet fully on.

I redo my makeup because I’m getting so red. In the en suite bathroom, I apply foundation and powder to cover my flushed cheeks and light freckles, then blush on top to restore a kiss of the color. I finish off by drawing my freckles back in with a light-brown eyeliner pencil to add a touch of innocence to my appearance.

Next, I do a few takes where I put the flat sheet and the blanket on the bed and tuck in the fabric, then grab the duvet and flap it in the air so it covers the bed completely. I fold down the flat sheet to cover the top part of the duvet and then throw my fluffed pillows one by one onto the bed.

Finally, it’s done. I grab my phone from its stand and take another shot of the complete bed with its smooth duvet and precisely tucked sheets. I review the footage and grin. It’s perfect. Now, no one can tell me I don’t know how to make a bed.

I throw myself on the bed I just devoted hours to perfecting, mussing the covers with my body. It feels silly to destroy what I just worked so hard for, but I already have all the footage I need and I’m exhausted. I sprawl on top of the bed, feeling the expensive mattress support me. I want to take a nap, but I’m already behind on the day, so I get up and pad downstairs.

The bottom floor of my house is an open concept eat-in kitchen and living room with huge floor-to-ceiling windows, one close to the front door and the other on the opposite wall of the living room facing our backyard. Though I have an office upstairs in a spare room that will one day be a child’s bedroom, I like to work downstairs where the natural light pours through the massive windows. I take a seat at the kitchen table and edit a video. This one is just a Morning Routine, since I’ve already used so much of the day on a single task. First, I take the various clips of myself making the bed and edit them down into just a few seconds of content. I look like an expert, pulling the overhang of the sheet into a tight triangle and tucking it in. The final second is a lingering shot of the made bed, the corners crisp and the pillows fluffed. Hours of work, boiled down into five seconds of video.

Since I spent so much time on the bed, I don’t have much new footage from today, but luckily I have a backlog of unused clips. I add a clip of eggs and bacon sizzling in the pan from a breakfast I made last week, a shot of the lunchbox I packed last night with Caleb’s ham sandwich and cut fruit, and footage of myself unloading the dishwasher a few days ago. The finishing touch is a brief voiceover.

“Another morning in my life as a traditional wife! I like to wake up early, since my husband’s day can’t start until mine does. He has a long day of work ahead of him, so I cook him a hearty breakfast. And don’t forget the lunch! I had to stop slipping love notes and pressed flowers in his lunchbox because he works with his dad and I was embarrassing him. So, I’ll save up all my declarations of love for when he’s back home tonight.”

Once the Morning Routine video is ready, I post it. I don’t allow myself to savor the accomplishment, since I’m so behind. I pull out my bullet journal and plan the rest of my day.

I have to block off time to have sex with Caleb tonight, since I couldn’t do so last night because of a fresh Brazilian wax. I’ve learned the hard way that having sex right after a wax leads to ingrown hairs so severe my groin looks like a dolphin with cystic acne. Still, I don’t want there to be a dip in our weekly sex sessions. I log the times we have sex in a spreadsheet because tracking how you spend your time reveals your true priorities. I can say I’m dedicated to my husband, but numbers don’t lie, so I keep an eye on indicators like incidents of intercourse per week and hours of quality time spent together.

I think the sex spreadsheet is a brilliant lifehack, but I can’t make a video sharing the strategy as it would be embarrassing to Caleb. Caleb is a very private person. He supports my social media presence because he agrees it’s important we push back against the feminist agenda and spread the word about the benefits of being a traditional wife. He doesn’t like to be in the videos, though, and doesn’t want me to talk about anything too intimate like the details of our sex life or what he does for a living. Maybe one day I’ll do one-on-one coaching with other wives and girlfriends, so I can discuss more personal strategies for pleasing a husband. Coaching could also create another income stream.

In addition to sex, I need to fit in a workout, some vacuuming, at least an hour of email correspondence with sponsors, an hour of responding to comments, and of course an hour to make dinner for Caleb.

I vacuum, then change into my gym set. The fast fashion site GlamGo sent me matching leggings and a workout top. The outfit is a bit tighter than what I would have chosen for myself, but it’s sponsored and I find compression leggings surprisingly comforting. When I wear them, I feel like my butt is getting a gentle hug all day long. I head back downstairs and fill my water bottle in the kitchen.

I jump when the doorbell rings, then swivel to look at my front door and the window facing my porch. The huge windows in my house are ostensibly so Caleb and I can take in the beauty of the woods where we live a few miles north of Portland, Maine. Right now, I’m taking in the sight of my obnoxious hippie neighbor Linda standing on my porch in her paint-stained overalls. From her expression, I can tell she’s either mad at me or in the midst of a scary acid flashback. The drawback of huge windows is that she can see me, too. I can’t hide.

I open the door, letting in the crisp spring air. It rained overnight and the woods are verdant, though unfortunately the leaves aren’t thick enough to block the view from my house to Linda’s. “Hey, Linda.”

Linda is glaring, which feels ironic since she’s all about peace and love. She moved in next to us six months ago and seemed okay at first, if a bit spacy. She even came by our house on the day she moved in, bearing inedible vegan carrot muffins and telling me how she had recently retired and was moving from Boston to Maine so she could have a whole barn where she could work on her paintings. She looks like she got lost on her way to Vermont, with her frizzy graying hair and paint-stained REI wardrobe.

She looks me up and down. “You’re not in one of your dresses.”

“I’m going to the gym.”

“I thought you’d have some sort of fifties getup for that, too, like one of those old swim outfits or athletic bloomers or something.”

“Believe it or not, my life is about more than just aesthetics.” I can tell Linda doesn’t believe me. I feel myself getting agitated, seized by a desire to slam the door in her face. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me like I’m some sort of weirdo. “Did you come over just to criticize my outfit, or…”

“No, actually. I just took this out of Indie’s mouth.” She opens her palm to show me a bullet casing.

I sigh. Her black lab Indigo is always poking around our property, and somehow Linda thinks that’s my fault. “If your dog stayed on his side of the fence, this wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Why are you shooting guns over here anyway? You’re scaring the birds away from my feeders.”

“Target practice. Just cans in the backyard. It’s on our property, so we can do what we want. Things are a little different here than in Massachusetts, but I know you’ll catch on if you stick around long enough.”

The target practice in question was for a video I posted a week back. I don’t post my guns on social media that often because Deb tells me “people get robbed and killed with their own guns all the time.” She doesn’t believe in posting valuable possessions online, which is funny because the whole point of social media is showing off the nice things you own. If it was up to her, Caleb and I wouldn’t have guns at all, but they’re an important part of our image. My videos with the guns frequently get the most views on YouTube, though on TikTok I’m pretty sure the algorithm suppresses them.

Linda clasps her palms together like she’s doing a yoga pose. “I can see you have some issues around private space and coexisting with others, and I empathize with that. But we are neighbors and we need to treat one another with kindness and respect.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. If this is a competition to see who can be more condescending, we’re at a stalemate because I can’t think of anything to say that isn’t openly hostile. Linda is the sort of person who thinks she’s empathetic because she took psychedelics in her early twenties, convinced herself she was one with mankind, and hasn’t bothered to consider anyone else’s perspective since then because why would she need to try to see things from someone else’s point of view when she already achieved ego death?

I’ve been there, too.

I took a research chemical called 25-I in my junior year of college with Micah, this guy I was obsessed with even though I didn’t really know him at all and he suffered from an object permanence problem that made it so whenever I wasn’t actively sucking his dick, he forgot I existed at all. As Micah and I lay tangled together on the twin-size bed in his dorm room, watching the red light from his bulb flicker and expand and the patterns on his tapestries dance, I felt a deep connection like we were part of the same organism and could read each other’s thoughts. I felt better than I had in my whole life; for the first time, I felt understood. I thought I was truly present with another human, truly communicating. I decided to test our new mind-reading skills by sending Micah a telepathic message. I pictured a beautiful cottage in the woods where two little kids played outside with a brown dog while Micah and I bent to weed a garden. “I’m picturing a scene. Can you tell what I’m thinking about?” I asked Micah, my head resting against his sweaty chest. He thought about it for a moment, then replied “a giant squid wrestling an orca”. The illusion that we could communicate without words, or even communicate at all, was shattered. A chemical net caught me from falling into despair, but the fact I still felt happy was yet another reminder that my emotional state was a product of the drug and nothing else. The psychedelic had given me no greater insight into his mind and certainly didn’t give him insight into mine.

Linda has no access to my mind or spirit and no amount of drugs will ever help her understand me. We are not one. If we were once stardust in the same star, that was too long ago to matter.

“I don’t need to do anything,” I tell her. “And the only person who needs to learn respect is you. Respect for other people’s privacy and their right to use their property as they see fit.”

“Do you not understand the concept of a social contract? Of the tragedy of the commons?”

Do you not understand that you’re picking a fight with someone who’s armed? I think, though for the first time all day I’m not armed. I keep a Ruger Max .380 in my thigh holster shorts when I’m wearing a dress, but that doesn’t work with leggings. When I go to the gym, I carry my gun off-body in a holster in my duffel bag. “Look, I’m going to the gym. You can learn to watch your dog better.”

“You and your boyfriend are something else,” she says as she stomps off towards her house.

“He’s my husband,” I call after her. I look down at the diamond on my ring finger for confirmation it’s still there after a year. It’s my most prized possession, so much so that I have absurd fears of it disappearing without warning when I’m washing dishes, like a sugar crystal placed beneath a running faucet.

***

The gym is nearly empty at this time of day, with most people at work. I record a video of my leg day routine, starting with pistol squats and working my way through the hip thrust machine, the squat rack, and some lunges with free weights. I like lunges because they feel like practice for drawing my concealed-carry gun if it ever comes to that. When I wear my thigh holster shorts, I need to step one leg back to easily draw the gun from the pouch on my inner thigh. Of course, my gun is in my gym bag right now.

I edit the video right there on the mats, even adding a voiceover since there are only a couple of people working out and the background noise is minimal.

“How many times have you seen a woman let herself go as soon as she finds a good man? I work out six days a week to give my husband the best version of myself possible. Most people think weightlifting will give you a masculine physique, but I find lifting gives me beautiful, feminine curves,” I say over footage of myself working my glutes in the hip thrust machine.

There’s a woman on a yoga mat a dozen feet away from me, on her back with her feet in the air as she stretches in the Happy Baby pose. She glares at me from between her legs when I start talking about women letting themselves go, but I continue my narration.

“Of course, I’d love pointers on my form from people who have been doing this longer,” I say over a clip of myself doing deadlifts with a kettlebell in each hand. I discovered long ago that any video of myself working out would be met with unsolicited feedback from dozens of men, most of them giving conflicting advice with you need to bend your knees more warring with keep your legs straight for the most likes in my comments section. Now, I ask for advice on form because this allows the ones who are trying to be useful to feel even more heroic while taking the wind out of the sails of the ones who give me advice in order to undercut me.

I post the video from the gym and grin when I see the time. I’m ahead of schedule for my day, giving me plenty of time to shower and do my hair before making Caleb dinner.

***

I’m recording myself blending pesto for a chicken pasta when Caleb comes home. He sneaks up behind me and kisses my neck as I speak into the camera. I giggle, butterflies in my stomach. I’m gleeful at the beautiful, organic moment that I just captured, which I can’t wait to watch again later. Maybe he’ll even let me add it to one of my posts. I hit stop on the video and turn to kiss him.

We’re nearly a year into our marriage, but his handsomeness still catches me off guard. He told me once that as a teen he couldn’t walk into an Abercrombie & Fitch without the sales team attempting to recruit him as a model. He has sandy blonde hair and long-lashed blue eyes that would be girlish were it not for his strong jaw and broad shoulders. He’s wearing Levis the same faded blue color as his eyes, paired with a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The outfit only heightens his rugged handsomeness. I feel the same way looking at him as I do when I check my follower count: I can’t believe this is all mine.

“Hey, honey.” He places his hands on my hips and I melt into him.

We kiss for a long minute, then he breaks away.

“I’m heading upstairs.” His voice is like whiskey.

“Of course. Dinner will be ready in a half hour.”

It’s important to give your husband time to decompress after he comes home from a long day of work. Some wives try to swamp their husbands with affection and quality time as soon as they cross the threshold, but I’ve learned that Caleb likes to be left alone at first, and then he’ll warm up to company like a shy cat does when it emerges from behind the sofa.

He goes to his gaming room upstairs to play video games while I finish making dinner. I can hear the distant artillery fire from his game, coupled with his yells into his headset about protecting the beaches. I take a video of myself pulling the roasted chicken from the oven, the steam flushing my cheeks a beautiful pink. When the pasta is plated and the table set, I walk up the carpeted stairs and stand outside his gaming room. With my cheek to the wood, I can hear his muffled groans and the sound of shells.

“Dinner’s ready,” I call.

“Be down in a minute.”

I head back down to the kitchen and make his lunch while I wait, using the leftover pesto and chicken to make a sandwich that I cut diagonally. I add chips and a cookie, but no love note since I found dozens of them in the foot space of his Chevrolet Silverado along with a rainbow of orange, blue, and purple pressed flowers I had slipped into his lunch bag. He admitted to me that he’d been pulling them out of his lunches in the mornings because his dad and the other guys at the boat dealership were making fun of him.

Caleb comes downstairs, now in sweatpants, and takes a seat across from me at the table.

We join hands and say grace.

“How was work?” I ask after our amens.

“Good.” He speaks with a mouthful of chicken. “Busy season. Everyone wants to get out on the water.”

“Your dad must be happy.”

Caleb snorts. “Don’t know how I’d be able to tell.”

I take a bite of the pesto chicken pasta. It’s beautiful-looking, but the chicken is dry. I watch Caleb eat, something like panic stirring in my gut, but he doesn’t comment.

He pulls his phone out. He checks it every so often for work and to track his investments, though I try not to use mine at the table. It’s been over fifteen minutes since I checked my TikTok likes and comments, and my brain is itching to do so but I resist.

Something on Caleb’s phone makes him smile. “CoinCoin is up. We have $15,000 now!”

“That’s great,” I say. He’s tried to explain cryptocurrency to me multiple times, but my brain shuts down every time he starts.

“I could use some good news today. Did you see what happened at GSBC?”

“No.” I don’t follow the news, since it feels contrary to my divine feminine nature to concern myself with things outside the home. Besides, it always ruins my mood to see mudslides, earthquakes, and train crashes.

“Protesters pulled the Gary Sprats statue down.”

“Really?” There have been protests at Caleb’s alma mater for weeks over the founder’s use of slavery to build the school, but I wasn’t expecting it to get this bad.

“Everyone’s lost their minds. I don’t understand this generation.”

He’s 32 and I’m 23, so the generation he’s talking about is mine.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into the other people my age,” I say.

“No work ethic. They’d rather destroy everything than put in the effort to build wealth for themselves. I never thought GSBC students would act like that, though.”

Caleb has strong traditional values. He went all the way to Indiana to attend Gary Sprats Bible College because none of the nearby bible colleges were conservative enough. Now, even GSBC is infected with wokeism.

After dinner, I do the dishes while Caleb heads upstairs to shower. When I get to the bedroom, he’s waiting for me.

I kneel by the bed like I’m praying and pull down his sweatpants. His body is still wet from the shower, making his penis chafe against the inside of my mouth. After I bob up and down on his dick for what feels like an eternity, he picks me up and throws me on the bed. He climbs on top and enters me, then hammers away before finishing with a groan.

We sprawl next to one another, his arm across my chest.

“I hope that knocked you up,” he says.

We’ve been married almost a year now and Caleb is desperate for children.

I look down at my flat stomach and imagine a hypothetical child with Caleb’s blonde hair and blue eyes. “We’ll call him Hans. Or Astrid, for a girl.”

Caleb grunts in affirmation. He likes names that celebrate his German and Scandinavian heritage, and I’m happy to name the kids in line with his blood instead of mine. I never felt a particular connection with my heritage, which I thought of as “generic white” my whole childhood. Caleb purchased me a DNA test for my last birthday, which traced my ancestry back to a hodgepodge of Eastern European countries, half of which I couldn’t find on a map. Caleb assured me that I shouldn’t feel embarrassed, since those countries change borders and names every five years.

“I like Hans and Astrid.” Caleb smiles at me, his eyes already sleepy like he is powering down after sex. “Or Magnus.”

“Like Magnus Archer?” That’s the name of a controversial former professor of mine who now has a popular podcast called Magnus Opus.

“I just like the name. I like Greta, too.”

“We can’t have Hans and Greta. Too much like Hansel and Gretel.”

He laughs. “Sure. How about Elke?”

“And Soren.”

He pats my belly. “We’ll use all those names eventually. Six kids is the minimum.”

I get up and go to the bathroom. In the mirror, my cheeks are flushed. I always feel guilty when I lie to Caleb. Of course, I’m not really lying. I just haven’t told him that the reason I’m not pregnant yet is because I have a hormonal IUD. I want to have kids with Caleb, but I want these first few years of our marriage to just be about us. Besides, I’m still young enough that we have plenty of time to have as many kids as he could want.

I pee and then hop in the shower for a quick wash, but don’t shampoo my hair since I’m on a strict every-three-days wash cycle to keep it lustrous.

When I go back to the bedroom, Caleb is holding his phone and listening to a podcast.

I grab my own phone, pop in my AirPods, and check TikTok. The likes and comments are pouring in on my two videos from today. I scroll through, grinning at the criticisms and compliments alike. It’s all engagement.

Multiple comments reference a leftist comedy account.

They’re talking shit about you on the Justin and Mac Show.

Justin & Mac sent me lmao

Justin & Mac are right this bitch crazy but her tits are amazing

I navigate to the Justin and Mac Show account and put in my own AirPods. The guys are doing a reaction video to a TikTok I made last week in which I prepared dinner for Caleb.

“What am I supposed to be looking at in this video?” Justin brays. “The meatloaf looks like shit. Like, worse than most shit ’cause at least most shit is moist. This dry-ass meatloaf looks like shit from some constipated heroin addict’s bleeding asshole.”

“All meatloaf looks like ass, but this is a new level.” Mac laughs, the sound a grating whinny. “But the video’s not about cooking.”

“It’s a fucking cooking video!”

“You’re supposed to look at her tits, not the meatloaf. And definitely not her face, ’cause she should be building a wall to keep that filler from migrating. It’s not a cooking video, it’s like…fetish content for white supremacists.”

“I see that. I see that.” Justin clicks his tongue. “It’s such a shame she’s crazy right-wing because her mommy milkers are amazing.”

I shudder at the phrase mommy milkers. The only small blessing of my middle school years was that “mommy milkers” hadn’t entered the lexicon yet. I heard about my “tits,” “knockers,” and “boobies” daily from my male classmates, but never that. When a man uses the phrase “mommy milkers,” it means he no longer cares about his own dignity and has no respect for yours either.

Mac laughs again. “What, are you alt-right now?”

“The fuck do you mean? I’m alt-right because I can appreciate a set of big naturals? I don’t agree with the bitch’s opinions, I’m just saying: would motorboat.”

“Conservatives love titties and socialists love ass.”

“That’s fake news, man.”

“No, it’s real! These right-wing dudes want a woman who’s always pregnant or nursing, so they’re into the big titties.” Mac gives a deep, hacking cough like he’s expelling a huge cloud of weed. “And besides, they can’t really see their girl’s ass since the trad wives are always wearing long skirts — ”

“Even when they fuck?”

“Yeah, trad wives fuck with the trad dresses on. Either that or through a hole in the sheet.” Again, that whinnying laugh, like he took a hit of helium along with his bong rip. “But I was saying, leftists love a good ass because a woman with strong glutes is a worker and you know we side with the proletariat.”

“Leftists can love titties and ass. I’m living proof.”

“What are you, a centrist? You see both sides of the issue?”

I exit the video because they’re no longer talking about me. I feel the need to take a shower, even though I just showered.

This is how ‘progressive’ men talk, I think. And these are the men who supposedly respect women? I feel grateful, not for the first time, that I don’t live in Brooklyn. I’ll never have to meet Justin, Mac, or anyone like them.

I look over at Caleb, who is asleep with his podcast still playing. He would never talk about me like that. That’s why I’ll be with him forever.

Chapter Two: Good Game

My alarm goes off before Caleb’s, so I can have breakfast on the table by the time he’s out of his shower. The first thing I see each morning when I walk down the stairs is a black-and-white photograph of me and Caleb from our wedding day. I’m in a vintage 1950s wedding dress with pearl buttons down the back, borrowed from Deb’s mother, and he’s in a suit. The photo is black-and-white, and I like how it’s impossible to tell from looking at it the decade in which it was taken. Only a few details, like the high resolution and Caleb’s wristwatch, tip off a viewer that this wasn’t taken in the fifties. We have that anachronistic sort of love, which — as I think about it — sounds like a good title for a Lana del Rey song.

I pad into the kitchen and fry up bacon, which is part of Caleb’s breakfast almost every day. Sometimes, I think I should feed him something healthier so we can have many happy decades together, but nothing compares to the smile on his face when he comes downstairs to the scent of bacon and freshly-brewed coffee.

He bounds down the stairs this morning like an oversized puppy and gives me a big kiss. “This smells incredible.”

“It’s just eggs, bacon, coffee, and toast.” I hand him a plate of eggs and bacon, then turn to pluck the toast from the toaster.

He shakes his head when I offer him toast. “I’m thinking of going low carb. There was a guy on the Magnus Archer podcast last night who only eats animal testicles. He made the switch in March and now he has so much energy he only needs to sleep four hours a night. Plus, he’s gained twenty pounds of pure muscle mass and he’s shooting ropes.”

I can imagine how nasty those ropes taste, but if Caleb wants to make a lifestyle change, then I’m here to support him. “I was going to make lasagna tonight. Should I reconsider?”

“No, lasagna’s fine. Just not too many noodles, okay? Only eating testicles is a step too far, but cutting back on carbs and eating more meat might be good for both of us.”

“Alright.” I consider layering all the noodles on my half of the pan, but I should probably go low-carb, too. “Your lunch has a sandwich, but you can just eat the chicken and pesto in the middle if you want.”

It’s funny to me that Caleb is so into Magnus Opus. Magnus Archer was my Comparative Religions professor at University of Southern Maine, where he was placed on leave after a lecture in which he ranked all the religions from best to worst. I didn’t realize how famous or controversial he would become when I took his class freshman year and ended up skipping half the lectures because they started before 9 AM. I missed the controversial lecture in question and was surprised to see him use his cancellation to launch a popular podcast.

I watch as Caleb walks out the door, the lunch I packed in hand. My heart swells. I love packing a lunch and imbuing it with love, and Caleb is probably the only person I’ll be able to do this for on a regular basis since we plan to homeschool our future children Soren, Elke, Hans, Astrid, etc.

***

The morning is a blur. I record and post some sponsored content for Boink, the company that sent us our mattress for free. I walk a tightrope in the video, since Caleb doesn’t like it when I discuss our sex life but the whole concept of the Boink brand was to design a mattress specifically for sex. The model they sent us is called the Missionary and it provides stability and support, plus two handholds for the man to use while he hammers away on top.

I go to the gym, buy groceries, and do a deep-clean/reorganization of our pantry to make it perfect for Instagram. I don’t like showering at the gym, so I take a long shower when I get home so I can shave my legs and armpits. I towel-dry thoroughly before getting dressed, since the clingy fabric of the thigh holster shorts chafes against wet skin. I have the shorts in eight colors and choose the light pink ones today. I put my gun on before anything else, pulling on the thigh holster shorts and holding the Ruger in one hand. The gun feels too cute and light to be deadly. It’s adorable and snub-nosed and — even with ten rounds inside — it feels more like a toy than a weapon. A lot of people think guns are phallic symbols, but at only eleven ounces, mine is lighter than most erect penises. After slipping the gun into the pouch on the inner thigh of my shorts, I put on my bra, pull on a faux-vintage gingham dress, and do my makeup.

I have a hair appointment tonight, so I prep the lasagna I’m going to make for dinner. I record the process, starting with the meat sauce bubbling on the stovetop. I open the can of tomatoes offscreen. If I showed it, everyone would dogpile as they always do when I reveal I don’t make everything from scratch. If I use fresh tomatoes, they want to know if I grew them. If I grew them, they want to know whether it was from seed or if I bought the plant. I’m not your nonna, I want to tell them. Sometimes I use a canned ingredient, and my husband still loves it.

“On days when I have appointments around 5 or 6 PM, I like to prep my husband’s dinner in the morning,” I say in the voiceover. “This way, when I get home tonight at 6:45, all I need to do is pop this lasagna in the oven and we’ll have a delicious meal cooked from scratch.”

I post the video, then pour the sauce into a tupperware. I blend ricotta with parmesan and egg, and place that mix in another tupperware. When I get back from my appointment, all I’ll need to do is assemble the lasagna and bake it.

***

Deb picks me up at 5:30 for the hair appointment. When I was a kid, I thought her car must be cool and fast because it was red, but now I realize it’s just a Toyota Camry and an old one at that. I can see the scrapes and dents in the body, some of which are my fault since I learned to drive in this car. In one particularly memorable instance, I met up with a guy from my high school at an abandoned baseball field after hours and gave him head in the dugout. When we both went to our respective cars to go home, I didn’t check my mirrors before backing out of my parking spot and smashed right into the car he was driving, leaving a dent in his front bumper and a matching one in the back of Deb’s car. He told me he would tell his parents that his car was dented in a hit-and-run while he was parked, and I told Deb the same. I feel shame every time I see that dent, partially for lying to Deb but mostly for conducting myself in such an unladylike manner in the years before I met Caleb.

I slip inside the vehicle and greet the woman I mostly grew up with.

“Hey, Deb.”

“Hey, honey.”

She hasn’t unfastened her seatbelt, but still attempts to give me a hug. She’s sixty now and her age shows in her hands, the only body part she doesn’t meticulously sunscreen. When she puts her hands on the wheel, I can see their ridged blue veins and scattering of sunspots. I want to look away, partially because I hate seeing physical imperfections in women, and partially because it’s a reminder that Deb is growing older and she won’t be around forever.

“What are you getting?” she asks.

I touch my hair on reflex. It’s soft and goes a little past shoulder length. “Going a bit blonder and getting a blowout. I’m trying to grow it out, so I’m not letting those women trim it today.”

She nods, taking a glance at my hair before looking back at the road. “It looks nice long. Though you look like Grace Kelly when it’s chin-length.”

Deb and I used to love watching old movies together, everything from Marilyn Monroe flicks to John Hughes films. I enjoyed most of the artsy films that Deb loved, like Blow-up and Breathless, but thought it would be easier to watch all three hours of Jeanne Dielman if the actress had done something a bit more feminine with her makeup.

“What are you getting?” I ask.

“A trim, plus I’m touching up the gray at my roots.”

I don’t understand why Deb even bothers, because she’s unlikely to meet anyone at her age. She still has stunning cheekbones, large eyes, and voluminous dark hair, but there’s no way a man would mistake her for someone fertile with those sun-spotted hands. It makes me sad to think of her being alone for the rest of her life, though she’s kept a cheerful attitude since she and Adam divorced.

“I’m paying for us both,” I tell her.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” I glare at her.

She sighs, like I’m placing a huge burden on her by paying for her cut and color. “If you insist. I’ll cover the tip.”

It’s easy for me to pay for my hair appointments because I have a separate bank account that Caleb doesn’t know about. Deb started the account for me when I was eighteen, with any money she had left over from the monthly foster care stipends she received for caring for me. She probably imagined I’d use the account for grad school or something equally serious, but she told me I could spend it any way I want and I do so. It’s actually grown since I was eighteen, partly from interest but mostly from my earnings as an influencer. I deposit some of my checks for sponsored content into my shared account with Caleb, but most I deposit in my secret account. I like having a separate bank account so I can buy the occasional coffee or $12 protein shake at my gym’s smoothie bar without having to justify the silly expense to anyone. It’s not that I think Caleb would yell at me or forbid me from spending money, it’s just that I’m embarrassed to show anyone my spending. I don’t want him to see me as frivolous. Men don’t like a high-maintenance woman, but they also don’t like a woman who’s not maintained.

It’s not like I spend my money only on myself. I buy Deb the occasional gift and give some money to Mom, too. She probably spends it on opiates, but I’d rather she use my money for that than have to do awful shit for her fix or buy from a shitty supplier who sells heroin laced with fatal amounts of fentanyl. A few years back, I got fed up with Mom driving while messed up on Percocet and alcohol and who knows what else, so I set up an Uber account for her with my card information. I can track every car ride she takes on my dime. It’s reassuring to know where she is at all times, even if it’s an address in some creepy warehouse neighborhood that’s probably a trap house.

The biggest benefit of having a secret bank account is that my husband doesn’t see how much I spend on personal upkeep. While we were dating, I saw Caleb comment on how other women were trying too hard. On our first date, we went to a steakhouse and had a waitress with false eyelashes, thick makeup, an orange-tinted sunless tan, and hair extensions that were a different shade of blonde from her bleached hair.

Caleb whispered to me “Is her other job at Hooters?”

I reddened because the woman was close enough to overhear. She must have been eager for a tip because she blinked her heavy lashes and pretended she hadn’t heard.

Caleb laughed at my reaction. “Don’t be like that. All I’m saying is, I’m glad you’re a natural beauty. I’d never date a girl I couldn’t take swimming.”

I had fake eyelashes, too, they were just more subtle. While I had professionally-done mink eyelash extensions, the waitress wore drugstore false lashes that weren’t cut to the dimensions of her eyes. It looked like she’d gotten lip injections at a low-cost place that had made them so plump they looked fake. The filler was migrating into folds at the corners of her mouth and her fake tanner was streaky. Her dyed-blonde hair was brassy and I could see her medium-brown roots.

I don’t believe men when they say they want natural beauty. Really, what they want is a more convincing fake. Caleb likes blonde women with dark eyelashes, which is almost impossible naturally. Either the hair or the lashes have to be fake. For me, both are but I paid the premium to have something fake look natural.

“How much do you think she spends a month on all that?” Caleb asked. “Has to be at least a hundred dollars.”

I laughed along, but inside I felt a rising dread. The reason the woman looked cartoonish to him was because she spent less money on her appearance than I did, not more.

I considered cutting back on my beauty spending after I pivoted from general lifestyle content to being a trad wife influencer, but the algorithm picks up videos of conventionally attractive women and leaves less polished women in the digital gutter. I need to look a certain way to get my message across. Besides, when any aspect of my appearance is off or incorrect, I feel like a little kid again.

Deb understands why it’s so important to me that my hair looks good. Caleb does not. I never want to tell Caleb that the first time my school called the Office of Child and Family Services on my mom was when I was sent home with a note saying I’d failed the lice checkup. Mom didn’t come home that night. Not knowing what to do the next morning and hungry for the free breakfast I received at school, I got on the schoolbus and came back to school still with a head full of lice. My scalp itched like I’d used Tabasco as shampoo, and when I scratched it I smeared blood and the dead bodies of the sesame-seed shaped insects down my forehead and neck. The condition felt shameful. It didn’t feel like something that should happen to a person, but to a tree. I was infested.

I got as far as my second-grade classroom, where I hung up my coat and stuffed my hat and gloves in my cubby. The teacher saw the dead bugs crushed on my forehead and told me I had to go outside. I walked out and stood in the cold of Maine in November, shivering in just my T-shirt and jeans. The school nurse talked to me outside, telling me we needed to wait for my mom to pick me up because I couldn’t stay in school with head lice. A counselor brought my coat and hat out to me in a plastic garbage bag. I never had the foster kid experience of moving from home to home with a garbage bag full of belongings because when I moved out of Mom’s place, I was able to pack a duffel bag. So, that day was the only time my stuff was handed to me in a garbage bag. I still burn with embarrassment, thinking of the counselor dropping my belongings into a trash bag and walking them out past my entire second grade class like I was somehow toxic, as was everything I had touched. My mom picked me up eventually, but when we got home she didn’t have the energy to put the lice shampoo on my head and comb my hair out.

“I don’t see the lice,” she told me. “I think they were wrong.”

I could feel the itchiness on my scalp, but I nodded. My primary way of expressing affection for Mom was by agreeing with her view of reality. When I would tell her I was hungry, she would tell me No, you’re not, we just ate. You’re just bored. I would agree, even if she had been napping for hours and we had not eaten in a long time. I agreed with her frequently. The house wasn’t dirty. I wasn’t sad. She was fine. We were both fine.

As soon as I agreed with her that the lice were imaginary, she seemed happier. She gave a big smile and patted me on the shoulder. She passed out early and I went to bed. The next morning, I got up before her and went to catch the schoolbus. The front office secretary stopped me and a school counselor called the Office of Child and Family Services, triggering a home visit. A week later, I was in a temporary foster home with seven siblings and nightly readings from a children’s bible. A month after that, I was living with Deb and Adam with my scalp lice-free but still raw from chemicals. Every time I scratched my head in class, the other kids would scoot their chairs away from me. By the end of the day, I would be an island, alone in a corner with all my classmates crowded on the other side of the room.

***

Deb stares at me as I climb out of the car. “You’re taking a gun into the salon?”

I don’t know how she’s so good at spotting the weapon concealed beneath my skirt. I’m wearing my thigh holster shorts under my dress, tight shorts with a pouch for a handgun on the inner thigh. The shorts are high-waisted and serve the dual purpose of slimming my figure through compression while also letting me conceal carry. No one else seems able to see the weapon, probably because no one thinks to look for a gun on a young woman. “Just in case. You know the world is crazy these days.”

She sighs. “I worry about you carrying a gun. Imagine the guilt you’d have to live with if you shot someone on accident.”

“It’s for self-defense.”

“When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you have a gun, every problem looks like one that can be solved by violence.”

“A lot of problems can be.”

“And violence makes even more problems.”

The discussion is the same one we always have. She shares what she considers wisdom and I nod, then do whatever I was planning to do anyway.

Deb gets out of the car and we head inside. We’re going to the same salon where she used to bring me as a kid. It hasn’t been updated since then, and still features the same cigarette scent and old wood paneling. Some of the chairs are still topped with dented silver dryer hoods. I go to a more upscale salon now, but Deb swears by her stylist here. I recognize my old hairstylist and Deb’s hairstylist from having been here dozens of times over the years, though I don’t remember their names or anything about them. Neither of them have great hair, which is a shame given their profession. My former stylist sports a bright dye-job that’s too young for her. She also looks like she went for dry shampoo when she should have washed her hair this morning. Deb’s stylist has hair that’s bleached to a brittle mess.

I sit down in the chair and try to explain what I want. I’m not someone who likes gossiping with salon workers, so this is the only speech I plan on making.

“I’d like a honey blonde,” I say, “but a bit lighter than my current. And with a bit of variation, so it looks natural. And no cut, just the dye job.”

The stylist nods along. Her hair is dyed magenta, teal, and purple. It’s bright and fake-looking, probably a turn-off to every normal guy she meets. The colors would be offensive even on someone in her twenties, but on a middle-aged woman they’re heinous.

“Did you confront Robert with the messages you found?” Deb asks her hairstylist. I don’t know how she remembers these details between appointments. I don’t even know the name of the woman who does my hair. I just know she smells vaguely of cigarettes and has doughy arms.

Deb’s stylist shakes her head. “I confronted him and he just started wordlessly packing up his things. Then he left. I guess he didn’t think the marriage we built for fourteen years was worth fighting for. The rat-bastard didn’t even say goodbye to his kids.”

“He surrendered the house,” Deb says. “You’ll get it plus full custody in the divorce.”

My hairstylist nods. I watch her bright hair move like the wings of a bird in the mirror as she uses a paintbrush to apply bleach to my roots. “She’s right. If he moves out, it’s like saying the house is yours. Gary did the same thing and regretted it in the end.”

These women are losers. They’re all divorced and acting like they won because they got to keep some property when they lost a man. I don’t want my hair done by losers. I’m worried that I’ll leave here with a hairstyle that makes me look like a sad divorcee. I fight the urge to bolt from the seat and run to a better salon.

I space out while my stylist applies the hair dye, lets it sit, and rinses it out. I look at myself in the mirror, trying to see whether there’s a bulge in my skirt from the Ruger in my thigh holster shorts. It’s a petite gun, small and lightweight, so I can’t see it in the mirror. Deb and the stylists keep the conversation going, while I get by with the occasional nod or monosyllabic response.

“How are things with your husband?” my stylist yells over the noise of the blowdryer she’s using on my hair. I’m antsy to get out of here, though I’m transfixed by the sight of myself in the mirror. My hair looks so soft, the new highlights subtle and shining. Caleb will love it, and so will the algorithm. I can’t wait to get home and have my husband run his hands through my soft waves — after I record a few videos of myself with this blowout, of course.

“Perfect.”

“That’s the newlywed phase.”

I hate when women tell me things like this. Oh, it’s easy for you to stay thin now, but just you wait. Oh, you have free time now, but when you have kids you won’t even be able to pee alone. Oh, you’re in love today but just wait a few years and you’ll hate his guts. Oh, you’re happy now, just wait for what life has in store. If they actually worked hard, they would be able to cling to happiness far longer and wouldn’t be so bitter that they felt the need to seek out happy young women and deliver dark prophecies to them like withered crones.

“I watch your videoblog,” the other stylist clucks. “Very nice life.”

I bare my teeth in a smile. “It is.”

I’ve earned it.

***

In the car on the way back to my house, Deb chatters about two kids named Ryder and Gemma. I’m unsure for a moment whether these are characters on some TV show she assumes I watch, or they’re her new foster kids.

“Ryder is in jazz band now, which means he has to get up for practice before school. Can you believe that? A sixteen year old waking up at 5:30 AM. I thought, I’ll believe it when I see it, but he’s so passionate he’s making it work. Honestly, it’s great seeing him so enthusiastic about something, though I wish he could drive himself. He nods off in the car half the time I’m driving him to school, though, so even when he does get his license, I think I’ll keep doing the early-morning driving for him.”

Deb likes to talk to me about the kids who live with her now. She calls them my siblings, but I don’t know them and I am not related to them. Kids pass in and out of her house quickly, moving back in with their biological parents as soon as their home situation improves. The rapid rate of turnover when I was young was good, since many of the kids were difficult to be around. One boy would have tantrums where he’d smash things. Deb would say “It’s just stuff,” but that was easy for her to say since I only had one bag of stuff and she had a whole house full of it. That boy’s mom came back for him, but mine never did. In the eleven years I lived with Deb and Adam, the only other foster kid to stay for more than two years was Lacey.

“How long have these two been living with you?” I ask.

“Almost a year. You know, if you want to meet them, you could come with me to pick them up. Gemma’s getting out of soccer any minute now, and Ryder is at the skate park with his friends.”

“I need to get home and make dinner for Caleb.”

“Can’t he make dinner tonight? Doesn’t he know you’re getting your hair done?” There’s a note of disapproval in her voice.

“He works, Deb. It’s my job to take care of the house.”

“It won’t kill a marriage for a man to cook once in a while, even if he works.”

“Well, you’re divorced, so what do you know?”

Deb grips the steering wheel a bit tighter. “And you’re twenty-three. As you get older, you’ll realize life happens despite how hard you work and how much you plan.”

“Whatever you have to say to justify your decisions to yourself.”

Deb hums to herself instead of responding. The thing about her is that I can be a bit of a bitch to her and she sticks around. I’m considering apologizing, but we’re almost to my house. The properties are sparse out here, far from town. People’s yards are crowded with junk cars and scraps of lumber. Tyvek vapor barriers on the sides of houses flap in the wind. We pass Linda’s house, where handmade windchimes dangle from the porch awning. I remember how aggressive Linda was yesterday. When I was little, I thought that all I needed for people to start treating me kindly was perfect hair and makeup and a shapely body. Now, I have all that and people are still rude to me.

Deb pulls into my driveway, parking between Caleb’s new Chevy Silverado and his mint green 1951 Chevrolet pickup. It was the vintage pickup that caught my eye when he picked me up on our first date. It was charming, the perfect union of masculine and feminine with its bright color, rounded front, and Caleb’s big metal toolbox in the truckbed. It called to mind old-time family farmers and first dates at ice cream parlors between giggling full-skirted girls and young uniformed soldiers. Nowadays, Caleb usually drives the Silverado with a boat hitch and leaves the vintage pickup for me to use when I run errands.

“Thanks for the ride,” I tell her. “I really appreciate it. Your hair looks so good, by the way.”

I think of this as a soft-launch apology, when I’m mean to Deb and instead of telling her sorry I make it up to her by being extra polite in our next few exchanges.

“How about I come in and say hi to Caleb. I’ve barely seen him lately.”

“No, that’s fine. He’ll be playing his video games anyway.”

“Alright, then.” She leans over to give me a sideways hug, her seatbelt still fastened. “I love you.”

“You too, Deb.” I’ve never called her Mom, though she cared for me in her home for a decade. I’ve been saving the Mom card, holding it close to my chest in case I ever need it.

***

Caleb isn’t in sight when I enter the house.

I yell “Babe, I’m home,” but there’s no response.

He must be upstairs in his gaming room. This gives me some time to make dinner. I set up my phone in its stand to record myself assembling the lasagna. I look great with my fresh blow-out, like I could have my own cooking show. It distracts from the fact I started cooking less than two years ago and don’t have a knack for it yet. The only time I baked as a kid was in middle school when Lacey and I decided to make Harry Styles a cake for his birthday. Deb helped us frost it with his name in sloppy lettering. We had no way of sending it to him, so Lacey and I ate it ourselves and took pictures for my Instagram with our faces and hands covered in frosting and crumbs. I tagged him in the photos but doubt he ever saw them. If he did, he’d just be confused by two thirteen-year-old girls eating a cake with his name on it. No one ever thinks thirteen-year-old girls can be funny, so they interpret their jokes as creepy, childish, or flirtatious. Instead of Harry replying, a bunch of random adult men popped up in my comment section to tell me how cute I looked with my face all messy and how Lacey and I should wrestle in the cake batter.

I film myself layering lasagna noodles, sauce, and cheese in a glass cooking dish. The oven beeps, informing me it’s pre-heated.

I stick the pan in. Now, I have fifty minutes to kill. I clean the kitchen, edit a video, reply to emails from advertisers, and set the table.

Since my hair is done, I decide to record myself opening a sponsored content package. GlamGo is paying me $500 for the ad. Plus, I can resell the clothes after for whatever they’re worth used. Of course, their new clothes retail for less than twenty dollars a piece, so the resale value isn’t high. I set up my camera and record myself ripping into the package.

“Oh my God, it’s beautiful!” My gasp is fake, but I do like the dress. Filming an unboxing video is kind of like having sex: it’s most realistic if you don’t fake it the whole time, but instead take your real reactions and add 300% more enthusiasm on top.

It’s a white eyelet dress with a high neckline and a tiny belted waist. The full skirt is reminiscent of 1950s fashion, but the fabric is much softer. It must be some sort of poly-blend. I’ve always loved vintage fashion, since the childhood days when I used to curl up on the couch with microwave popcorn and watch Turner Classics with Deb while her husband Adam hovered in the back, unable to commit to watching the whole film but curious enough to keep sticking his head into the room. I have a few real vintage pieces courtesy of Deb’s mother, but most of the actual vintage stuff I find in thrift stores is disappointing. The fabrics are too stiff and the cuts unflattering, and everything is made for women five inches shorter than me.

I often feel like a child playing dress-up as a princess when I try on full-skirted, shiny satin dresses from the 1950s. Sometimes, the clothes look too new despite being decades old, especially the synthetic fabrics from the 1960s. Vintage clothes need to be viewed on film camera to look really vintage. Viewed in person, they sometimes look cheap. I expect a 1960s striped shirt to make me look like Jean Seberg in Breathless, but instead it looks like something I could buy at Old Navy. This GlamGo dress, manufactured in Indonesia and sold for $14.99, looks more vintage than the clothes I find at actual vintage stores. It looks like my idea of the 1950s come to life, like the white dress Marilyn Monroe wears in that iconic scene in The Seven Year Itch where she stands over the subway grate and the rush of a passing train blows up her skirt.

I’m considering trying the dress on when my timer goes off. I pause my video, drop the dress and the ripped package on the couch, and put on my quilted oven mitts to pull the lasagna from the oven.

“Caleb?” I call. “Dinner is ready.”

No response. I settle the lasagna on a trivet on the dining room table.

The dress I’m wearing doesn’t have pockets, so I tuck my phone in the crook of my elbow and walk upstairs. I can’t hear anything from the gaming room. Usually, I can hear noise and artillery fire from inside, and Caleb yelling into his headset “They’re taking the beach!”.

I knock. Nothing. I open the door and peek inside. Caleb is in his gaming chair, slumped forward so I can only see his legs and dangling arms. The screen in front of him is dark.

He fell asleep, I tell myself, but my heart rate still spikes. I’ve never seen him nap in this position.

I walk towards him. The controller is on the ground and I hit it with my foot. The screen turns back on, displaying a black-and-white image of Caleb’s character’s sprawled corpse beneath the message “GAME OVER: The Allies have taken Omaha Beach”.

I can smell a metallic stench in the room.

“Hello?” I call. “Caleb?”

He does not move. I approach the gaming chair until I’m right behind it looking down, and that’s when I see Caleb’s slumped shoulders and the hole in the back of his head.

If you’d like to find out what happens next, who killed Caleb, and how Haven will cope with no longer being a trad wife (or any sort of wife), you can find the full book here.