I’m going to keep it 100%, up until that second to last chapter this was a very solid four star read for me. We meet Jane when her life is falling apart, and we see that literally bubble over in her and she snaps. Fairly so, like if anybody deserved to snap it was Jane. The way that it is portrayed, the way that she deals with it mentally, physically, and emotionally, it was all very genuine. Jane has some very unhealthy points of view, and those are slowly addressed in the text which I really love to see. Considering what she is dealing with, what her daughter is dealing with, and how her life is changing, I thought that it was all addressed and respected, really well in the story.
Also detective Chavez, was delicious. He was charming, he was cute, he was funny, and he was a nice counterpoint to how horrible Dan was as a person. I think that Jane deserved to have somebody look at her and engage with her and see her as a real person and not as a prop in their lie of a life. But in every way that detective Chavez was amazing, Dan was disgusting. Infidelity for 18 years is disgusting, trying to justify that and emotionally manipulate your spouse into suffering that in silence is disgusting. The second to last chapter attempts to rewrite his wrongdoings and make him seem very sympathetic, I have very little sympathy for a cis white man in his 40s keeping himself in the closet and destroying his wife and child in the process. This is a powerful doctor, someone who has a lots of money and a lot of influence, that’s the type of person who could weather a storm like coming out even later in life. So there was by no means a need for him to emotionally manipulate his wife, or neglect his kid. Dan was a truly horrific person and I was really glad to see that that was finally called out by Jane, that she finally found her voice and told him exactly what a dirtbag he was. Because he was a giant dirtbag! But the second to last chapter tries and paint him as some thing else and I couldn’t abide by that, because the last 18 years prove that he’s an absolute piece of shit.
To be fair that was my only giant problem, Jane‘s new friends were really funny, the relationship that she was trying to salvage with her mother and her sister was amazingly and realistically done, and seeing her daughter get the growth and the care that she needed was amazing. And remember detective Chavez? He was everything. If the change in personality for Dan hadn’t happened at the very end and he had shown that he was a human being with you know, some compassion maybe I wouldn’t of knocked off a whole star for that but it really bothered me in the deepest way to see this trying to salvage his character when in reality he’s a unrepentant douche nozzle.