This HaBO request is from Michelle, who is trying to find this book:
Husband thinks his wife is dead, movies on, and then she returns.
The female main character goes to another country for some reason. There is an accident (bus accident, I think), and the FMC is presumed dead. She actually has amnesia and is taken in by some older couple who uses her as unpaid labor. Eventually she remembers and makes her way home (with difficulty, I believe).
She get home, and her best friend has moved in with her husband to help him take care of their kids (two girls, possibly twins). It turns out that the husband and the best friend got into a relationship while the FMC was gone, and is now engaged…
There are a few scenes I remember:
1. One of the girls is ill/hurt and needs to go to the hospital. The BF sets it up so that the FMC is left at home watching them leave. She does a lot of things like that, trying to show the FMC that she is the mommy and wife now.
2. At the end, the FMC is sunning herself on the patio/outside somewhere. The BF comes to say goodbye. I think she says she always had a thing for the husband. She’s leaving town, she lost the male main character and obviously her friendship will never recover.
3. The MMC and BF talking in her room about the engagement. They don’t know how to tell the FMC.
4. The MMC telling the BF that the FMC is his one and only love, he only got involved with her because he thought FMC was dead. (I am a bit doubtful of this, see point 3 above.)
I hope someone can help!
This sounds…really sad and painful for the heroine.
It sounds vaguely like the plot to My Favourite Wife starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.
Not 2 kids, but it also sounds like one of the main plots from the TV show Glitch.
And the remake of that movie with Doris Day and James Garner, Move Over, Darling.
This is A ME AND YOU THING by Taylor Dean. In her author’s note, she specifically mentions that she’s doing a serious take on the premise of the two movies mentioned above.
Slightly o/t, but there’s a LaVyrle Spencer historical romance which features the same plot but with the genders reversed. The heroine’s husband is (iirc) on a whaling ship and gets lost at sea. Eventually, he is declared dead and the heroine remarries. Then her first husband returns. Angsty heartache ensues.
All my fond memories of LaVyrle Spencer make me want to immediately search out that book, @DiscoDollyDeb, and read or reread it. Why oh why aren’t there more hours in a day?!
@DiscoDollyDeb and @Meg: That LaVyrle Spencer is “Twice Loved”.
“Five long years ago, Laura Dalton stood on the bleak Nantucket shore waiting for her beloved husband Rye to return—until the day she learned his ship was lost at sea. Now, Laura’s lonely heart has found solace in Dan, Rye’s closest friend.
Dan has been a beacon of light in her time of darkness, becoming a father to the child that Rye never knew and giving her a reason to live again. But who could foretell that a wind-roughened sailor with sun-bleached hair would come back into their lives? That Laura’s heart could betray her soul? That Rye would come home again…”
A ME AND YOU THING by Taylor Dean is the one I was thinking of! Thank you so much 🙂