★★★ 3.5
This book was definitely an improvement over the last one. The plot definitely wasn’t as easy to guess. Frida got me with this one, and I’m glad. Things were less predictable and more realistic in terms of how the conflict was resolved. If you read my (long and extensive) review for The Housemaid, you would know that I didn’t really like it.
So, after the events of the last book, Nina gave Millie a hefty sum of money and recommended her to other ladies in similar situations. Millie started helping women with abusive husbands escape their situations (and she would get rid of the husbands when the situation was dire). She and Enzo did this (they were also confirmed to be dating). But now, Enzo’s gone to Italy. Millie is a normal housekeeper in New York for some rich lady and lives in a shitty apartment in the Bronx or something. She has a boyfriend named Brock who’s a lawyer, and she’s in college to become a social worker to continue helping people.
After her boss’s baby recognizes Millie as her mother, she gets fired. Despite her employer being rich, Millie is now so broke she can’t afford a month’s rent. She has 200 dollars in her bank account. My first grievance is how Millie never has any money. She got money from Nina, worked for other rich ladies, and her latest boss was rich. She obviously gets paid well because she says so herself. And Millie doesn’t spend lavishly on luxuries. Plus, her apartment was in a terrible location and an ill-maintained building. So where does all this money go?? Like, I know New York is expensive, and rent is always high, but it’s a bad apartment. She can’t be paying over $500-$700 per month, right? It’s tiny, and it’s all one room save for the bathroom.
Anyway, she then gets employed by another rich family—the Garricks. She speaks to Douglas Garrick, the husband, instead of his wife, Wendy. He tells Millie that Wendy is chronically ill and that she shouldn’t bother her under any circumstances. Millie, of course, ignores this. But we’ll talk about that later.
I wanna talk about Enzo. So how come he’s able to just go back to Italy? I didn’t really talk about this, but in the last book, they mentioned that he was forced to leave because of like some mafia stuff. Basically, there are bad guys out for him, and he cannot return under any circumstances. When Millie mentions that Andrew could get Enzo deported back to Italy, he reacts with fear. So obviously, this is something serious. He shouldn’t be able to go back if they stressed it that much. And now he’s just back because his mom is sick? The bad guys got killed by bigger bad guys?? You’re telling me every single member of whatever mafia group was after him got killed, and now suddenly there’s no one after him? That’s one unrealistic aspect that I noticed. I mean, how could he just leave the US indefinitely? Did he not have a life established there? But whatever, so they broke up when Enzo left and she started dating Brock.
So, something I wanna touch on quickly is that Millie felt constantly watched, like she was being stalked. There was also this car with a missing headlight that she saw everywhere. So I had a lot of theories about that, but turns out it was just Enzo. Which I did not expect. So, he came back from Italy but never told Millie because she had like moved on and had her new boyfriend and stuff.
Millie also had this really creepy neighbor who kept trying to talk to her. He ends up trying to assault her, basically. And Millie is strong, as we’ve established, and she pushes him down the stairs after spraying him with mace (which is like pepper spray, I guess). She ends up facing charges for attacking HIM because witnesses saw her hitting him and pushing him down the stairs. This was a nice criticism of how assault cases are dealt with, and I really empathized with Millie in that situation. She’s just a nice person trying to help people, and I hated her a lot less when she wasn’t going after another woman’s husband and being a homewrecker. That neighbor guy ends up in prison after the police find drugs in his apartment, which were planted by Enzo to help Millie.
However, even now that she works for the Garricks, who again pay her very generously, she still complains about money and rent. I refuse to believe she’s truly struggling with money so much. Where does her salary go? I know she pays tuition, but it’s not like she’s at Harvard or something.
Sidenote: I hate how Enzo is with Millie now. I really felt more chemistry between him and Nina. I reallyyyy wanted him to be with Nina. I felt like he just got with Millie because she’s the option he has left now that Nina is gone—despite the author being at pains to show that they really love each other, but I just didn’t feel it. It felt like we were told about their love rather than shown. I guess a part of it has to do with the fact that Millie never needed Enzo to save her, unlike Nina. She is strong on her own, and that’s what I like about her. We’ll talk about their relationship a bit more later.
So, let’s talk about her current man, Brock. Brock is this sweet, handsome, successful guy. But he has a heart problem and has a shorter life expectancy. This is why he’s in a rush to settle down, get married, and have kids. Unlike Millie, who’s really closed off and often forgets he exists. Millie is such a bad girlfriend to him; she cancels on dates last minute, never tells him she loves him back, keeps letting him down, and never lets him in. She’s scared to let him in because she doesn’t want him to find out about her criminal record. She thinks he’d view her differently. But this guy loved her so much that I truly think if she had just told him, he might’ve been shocked at first, but he would’ve accepted it. Like, yeah, okay, she killed a guy, but she was only 17 (I think) and was defending her friend. So it really isn’t that bad if he hears her out. It’s better than having him find out on his own and then feel betrayed and lied to. That isn’t what happened (to an extent), but that will come up later. I just wanted to say, this guy seems so sweet, and she’s so bad to him. Like, he really wants her to move in with him, and he has a great apartment in a nice part of the neighborhood (plus, it’s closer to the Garricks, where she’s working), so there isn’t really a reason not to. The only thing stopping her is her secret, but I wish she would just tell him. She lives in an unsafe place and can barely afford rent, and she knows Brock wouldn’t make her pay rent. So why not move in with himmmmm?
Okay, so now that we’ve gotten the side plots out of the way, let’s talk about the Garricks. When Millie starts working for them, she’s very nosy about Wendy. Wendy never comes out, so when Millie makes dinner, she keeps asking Douglas if she should bring Wendy’s plate up to her, even though he’s clearly irritated by her nosiness, which pissed me off, too. I wanted her to just work and get her money; that’s the logical thing to do. And if your employer says Don’t bother my wife, then I wouldn’t bother her. But Millie is better than me lol. I have to keep reminding myself that she’s a good person who feels this need to help others. So of course she’s a bit suspicious about Wendy’s “illness” and wants to investigate.
So it’s later revealed that Millie’s advertisement never went up. This means Douglas sought her out. She asks him about it, and he says he got the number from his wife. I had so many theories, but none of them were right. These theories included: Douglas was connected to the guy Millie killed when she was 17, Douglas is secretly in love with her and stalking her (which got disproven when Enzo turned out to be the stalker), Wendy was dead in the guest bedroom the whole time. One theory I had which was close to the truth was that I wasn’t sure if Douglas really was hitting Wendy or if she was doing something on purpose to let Millie know something. I didn’t really understand what Wendy’s motives might have been, but I think I got pretty close. (Let me have this win pls)
I also thought that Douglas had like secret cameras in the house and was watching Wendy, and that’s why she kept telling Millie not to help. But Wendy wanted Millie there and got her number from a friend whose husband Millie dealt with. That was my theory, and it was partly correct, I guess. Wendy did get Millie’s number from a friend with an abusive husband that Millie helped, but it wasn’t with the intentions I had assumed.
I’m gonna skip over some insignificant details and theories that I had.
Millie ends up helping Wendy escape, but it backfires, and Douglas finds her. She’s back, and she’s trapped and abused (or that’s what Millie thinks), and out of desperation, Wendy considers ending her life and shows Millie the location of a gun Douglas has hidden in a fake book.
One day, Millie goes to the Garricks’ apartment/penthouse and finds Douglas choking Wendy. Millie grabs that very gun and shoots him, killing him. Wendy tells Millie that she’ll help her cover it up and tells her to leave through the back door. The next day, the news gets out that Douglas is dead. He’s this very important, rich tech guy, so it’s on the news. That’s when Millie realizes that the man she killed was not Douglas Garrick, but someone who looked like him.
Millie is a suspect, and she tells the police the story that she and Wendy agreed to. However, now Wendy is making it seem like Millie and Douglas were having an affair and that Millie killed him. She gets Brock as her lawyer, but he finds out about her criminal record, and they end up breaking up. Wendy is lying and is trying to frame Millie for Douglas’s death.
The story then shifts to Wendy’s point of view. She’s been lying about everything. Douglas never hit her. He was a great guy. He loved her. She orchestrated all this to get rid of him. The Douglas that Millie met was actually Wendy’s affair partner, Russell. He’s the husband of Douglas’s assistant or secretary or something. He’s the exact guy Wendy wants, except he’s not rich. She signed a prenup when she got married to Douglas, so the only way to get that money is to kill him (or divorce him and still get millions of dollars). But Wendy is greedy. She got with Douglas even though she never really loved him because he had money. She grew up poor, and she never wanted to live like that again. Even though Douglas wasn’t her type, she was determined to change him. But the poor guy just didn’t care about that stuff. He was a down-to-earth nerd who just happened to become a billionaire. And he got taken advantage of by Wendy because of her greed. He loved her until the last minute. So, anyway, Douglas ends up finding that Wendy is cheating on him with Russell, but he suggests going to couples counseling, because he loves her and wants this marriage to work out. She tells him that she doesn’t love him and just wants to get divorced; however, there was a clause in the prenup that if she cheated on him, she wouldn’t get a penny of his money. So, she wasn’t going to divorce him. She lived in the New York penthouse while he lived in Long Island. She lived in the penthouse with Russell. But she was being cut off by Douglas, so she made this plan. She heard about Millie and wanted to make it seem like she was being abused by Russell (acting as Douglas) to get rid of him and get her money. One thing she also lied to Douglas about was her inability to have children, which was a very important thing to him and something that she used to manipulate him.
I liked how the author depicted the desperation of somebody who lived in poverty. Wendy was so desperate to never return to her old life that she did all of this. She really captured just what desperation can do to a person.
So, after Millie “killed” Russell (turns out he never died, it was all faked), the real Douglas goes to the penthouse to visit Wendy. He gives her another chance and says he still loves her. But she kills him.
Millie is then blamed for this murder.
Because of all the evidence against Millie, the police get an arrest warrant for her and plan to send her back to jail.
Wendy and Russell go to celebrate their success (and money) in a cabin. But Wendy gets a phone call from the police department, who tell her that there actually is a camera at the back entrance, from which Millie was seen leaving before the time of Douglas’s death. This means Millie couldn’t have been the killer. They tell Wendy that they’d like to question her more at the station, but she hangs up. (Also, at some point, Douglas’s lawyer tells Wendy that Douglas donated all his money to charities and that she won’t get a penny.)Then, the electricity cuts. Russell is killed. Wendy thinks it’s Millie out to get her. But it turns out it was actually Russell’s wife, Marybeth. Marybeth has a bottle of pills that are used for heart problems (for people like Millie’s boyfriend) and a knife, I think. I’m not sure if it was a gun or a knife. She makes Wendy write a suicide note and a confession for Douglas’s murder. But instead of killing her, she reveals that the wine Wendy had been drinking had that heart medicine in it. Which would kill her. She ends up dying, and Millie is told she is not going to get arrested.
In the epilogue, Enzo is moving back in with Millie. Then, it is revealed that Millie was the one who gave those pills to Marybeth; they were the spare pills Brock left in Millie’s apartment. Millie did this for revenge against Wendy. I knew Millie wasn’t gonna take it like a good boy. I knew she would do something to get revenge. As she should. And that’s how it ends.
I didn’t like Wendy’s character at all. Which, yeah, she’s meant to be unlikable, I guess. Like I can understand her to some extent, but I felt really bad for Douglas. All this for him to die. Like, once you’ve realized you’re incompatible, why stay with him? She should’ve just divorced him as soon as she started cheating with Russell.
I did like how they got Millie out of trouble with the police. Because in the previous book, it was really unrealistic. But for this one, there was actual evidence saving her from jail.
I won’t be getting the next book in the series, to be honest. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t enjoy the story. I didn’t really get into it like the first one. The plot was better than The Housemaid, though. I just don’t think Frida McFadden is for me. I won’t be reading any of her other books. I just couldn’t bring myself to really care about any of the characters or what was happening at all. Everyone was annoying, even Enzo in this one. So yeah, that’s my review.
