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When Mattie Hart is diagnosed with ALS, her world is forever changed. Will she survive? And if so, how?
Behind the shiny façade of her idyllic life, Mattie Hart feels as though she is gradually falling apart. After sixteen years of marriage, she has discovered that her husband, Jake, a high-profile defense attorney, is having yet another affair. But it is only when Jake finally confesses his infidelity and goes to live with his girlfriend that a far greater tragedy descends. Mattie is diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that severely affects her life expectancy and everything she holds dear. Racked with guilt over his wife's diagnosis, Jake returns home to take care of Mattie. In this most daunting and unexpected of circumstances, Joy Fielding deftly reveals the astonishing power of love to defy the greatest odds and to heal the deepest wounds.
ONE
She was thinking of ways to kill her husband.
Martha Hart, called Mattie by everyone but her mother, who regularly insisted Martha was a perfectly lovely name - "You don't see Martha Stewart changing her name, do you?" - was swimming back and forth across the long, rectangular pool that occupied most of her spacious back yard. Mattie swam every morning from the beginning of May until mid-October, barring lightning or an early Chicago snowfall, fifty minutes, one hundred lengths of precisely executed breast stroke and front crawl, back and forth across the well-heated forty foot expanse. Usually she was in the water by seven o'clock, so that she could be finished before Jake left for work and Kim for school, but today she'd overslept, or rather, hadn't slept at all until just minutes before the alarm clock went off. Jake, of course, had experienced no such trouble sleeping and was out of bed and in the shower before she had time to open her eyes. "Feeling all right?" he'd asked her, already dressed and out the door in a handsome blur before she was able to formulate a response.
She could use a butcher knife, Mattie thought now, pushing at the water with clenched fists, slicing the imaginary foot-long blade through the air and into her husband's heart with each rise and fall of her arms. She reached the end of pool, using her feet to propel herself off the concrete, and made her way back to the other side, the motion reminding her that a well-timed push down a flight of stairs might be an easier way to dispatch Jake. Or she could poison him, adding a sprinkle of arsenic, like freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to his favorite pasta, like the kind they had for dinner last night, before he supposedly went back to the office to work on today's all-important closing argument for the jury, and she'd found the hotel receipt in his jac
Behind the shiny façade of her idyllic life, Mattie Hart feels as though she is gradually falling apart. After sixteen years of marriage, she has discovered that her husband, Jake, a high-profile defense attorney, is having yet another affair. But it is only when Jake finally confesses his infidelity and goes to live with his girlfriend that a far greater tragedy descends. Mattie is diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that severely affects her life expectancy and everything she holds dear. Racked with guilt over his wife's diagnosis, Jake returns home to take care of Mattie. In this most daunting and unexpected of circumstances, Joy Fielding deftly reveals the astonishing power of love to defy the greatest odds and to heal the deepest wounds.
ONE
She was thinking of ways to kill her husband.
Martha Hart, called Mattie by everyone but her mother, who regularly insisted Martha was a perfectly lovely name - "You don't see Martha Stewart changing her name, do you?" - was swimming back and forth across the long, rectangular pool that occupied most of her spacious back yard. Mattie swam every morning from the beginning of May until mid-October, barring lightning or an early Chicago snowfall, fifty minutes, one hundred lengths of precisely executed breast stroke and front crawl, back and forth across the well-heated forty foot expanse. Usually she was in the water by seven o'clock, so that she could be finished before Jake left for work and Kim for school, but today she'd overslept, or rather, hadn't slept at all until just minutes before the alarm clock went off. Jake, of course, had experienced no such trouble sleeping and was out of bed and in the shower before she had time to open her eyes. "Feeling all right?" he'd asked her, already dressed and out the door in a handsome blur before she was able to formulate a response.
She could use a butcher knife, Mattie thought now, pushing at the water with clenched fists, slicing the imaginary foot-long blade through the air and into her husband's heart with each rise and fall of her arms. She reached the end of pool, using her feet to propel herself off the concrete, and made her way back to the other side, the motion reminding her that a well-timed push down a flight of stairs might be an easier way to dispatch Jake. Or she could poison him, adding a sprinkle of arsenic, like freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to his favorite pasta, like the kind they had for dinner last night, before he supposedly went back to the office to work on today's all-important closing argument for the jury, and she'd found the hotel receipt in his jac