Smile for the Neighbors
Lainey Wyler remembers every word anyone has ever said to her. Nine years as a court stenographer made sure of it. So when her loving husband Mitchell starts telling her....
Lainey Wyler remembers every word anyone has ever said to her. Nine years as a court stenographer made sure of it. So when her loving husband Mitchell starts telling her she forgot things she never forgot, she believes him. Everyone on Sweetbay Circle does. Then comes their fifth anniversary party. In front of thirty neighbors and a livestream, Mitchell tearfully plays a doorbell video: Lainey, barefoot in her robe, holding a kitchen knife in the Lovells' yard at three in the morning. She has no memory of it. By sundown the psychiatrist next door has signed her emergency hold. By Monday a judge who lives four doors down has made her husband her guardian. In thirty days a court will decide if she ever gets her own life back. At midnight a cheap phone rings inside her laundry chute. The voice belongs to Noelle Finchley, the woman who lived in Lainey's house before her and was declared dead five years ago. "That was me in the video, new girl. Break into Candace Lovell's freezer tonight and I'll keep you out of Stillwater House." What Lainey finds under the casseroles labeled with her own funeral is the first page of the Quiet Program: the perfect neighbors' twenty-year business of erasing inconvenient wives. Her husband has a second wife two hours away. Her honey tea has been dosed. And the first name in the ledger is her mother's. Thirty days. One street. Every neighbor smiling. Listen to Smile for the Neighbors, only on Pocket FM.