OTB #10: TWO WOMEN AND A MAN (Women's Fiction)

TITLE: TWO WOMEN AND A MAN
GENRE: Adult Women's Fiction

When Robin’s adoring husband succumbs to drinking after his student’s death, he verbally attacks her, but doesn't remember the abuse. While Robin pieces together what the insults meant, she befriends a troubled 20-year-old, only to discover her husband and the woman have a history that may destroy her marriage.
     
Robin checked her phone again. 1:00 AM.

David should have been back by now. He hasn’t called. Hasn’t texted. She’d tried calling him but only got his voice mail. No response.

Winter’s twilight had been closing in when he’d driven off to deliver one of her homemade pizzas. Sienna, a freshman in his high school art class, was very sick.

“The chemo drip has stabilized her leukemia,” he’d told her, “but she’s wiped out, and they don’t know if she’ll recover. Her family is stricken.”

She wasn’t supposed to take a turn for the worse, Robin thought. Doesn’t chemo fix fifteen-year-olds nowadays?

Though none of this explained why her husband wasn’t home.

“Too invasive,” she’d told him when he suggested downloading the Find My Friends app to their iPhones. “Why would we ever need to track each other’s movements?”

Damn it. He was right, as usual.

She walked to the window and looked down the snow-covered street. Another six inches were expected in Fettle, a suburb of Pittsburgh, before morning.

David’s last text had come when the kids were still awake—Leo, coloring a paper mask he had brought home from preschool that morning and Pearl, having finished a drawing, looking up from her Percy Jackson book.

“When is Daddy going to be home?”

Robin read his text again: Going to miss kids’ bedtime. Group of students visiting Sienna. She’s unresponsive. Trying to comfort them. She clicked the phone’s home button and dropped her arm to her side.