She married a widower. She inherited his wife's garden.
Nora came to Merritt House as the hired gardener and stayed as the second Mrs. Merritt — thirty-four, unmothered, still getting dressed in the bathroom six months into a marriage she can't quite believe is hers. Adam is generous, attentive, a respected cardiologist who tells her daily what she's done for him. The garden he's given her is one of the finest in the county, built over twenty years by his first wife, Vivian, who drowned in the lake at the bottom of the property when her heart lost its rhythm in cold water.Nora is a gardener before she is anything else, and she reads a border the way other people read a sentence. Which is how she knows the east walk is wrong. The rhythm is too regular — three bitter, old-fashioned herbs repeating at intervals a surveyor would love, planted alone, in the rain, in the last autumn of Vivian's life.
Vivian wrote everything down. Dates, sources, Latin, what she paid for a peony in 1998. Whatever she was doing out there at the end is recorded somewhere — and somewhere behind a locked gate is the white garden she closed to everyone, including the garden club, including her husband.
What Nora finds inside that gate is beautiful, deliberate, and poisonous in every one of its twenty-six species.
A dead woman left a message in the only language she trusted. The second wife is the only person alive who can read it — and she is sleeping beside the man it's about.
The Second Wife's Garden is a slow-burn gothic suspense about marriage, evidence, and the terrible patience of a woman who plans in seasons.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Mara Voss's The Second Wife's Garden