The Housemaid’s Secret is Freida McFadden’s 2023 follow-up to The Housemaid, published a year earlier. Two years later the author would make the story a trilogy with the publication of The Housemaid is Watching. The series of novels follows the story of Millie, the titular domestic employee.
It is four years after the events of the previous novel and Millie has been engaged as a housekeeper for a strange husband and wife. In the grand tradition of gothic romances, Douglas Garrick is a wealthy man who tells Millie that the woman she will be working for, his wife, is “unwell” which is always in these stories code for suffering mental illness. Also in the grand tradition of such stories, mystery about Wendy Garrick’s state of mind—and marriage—becomes a source of intrigue for the domestic help because she spends so much time locked behind a door. The mystery surrounding the Garricks is only intensified for Millie by the sounds she can hear coming from the other side of the door. Sounds such as a woman weeping and loud arguments. Suspicions of spousal abuse seem to be confirmed for Millie when she one day discovers blood in the bathroom and bruises on Wendy’s face.
Millie’s past is integral to what happens because she recently served a stint in prison for helping an abused wife deal with situation. The housemaid finds herself thinking she’s come across a similar situation and is moved to insist that Wendy do something with her circumstances. The past also seems to be repeating when Millie is moved to violence to protect Wendy and ends up shooting Douglas and believing she has murdered him. Then one day Millie sees Douglas Garrick live on television and realizes that the man she shot to death was somebody else. Wendy tells her own backstory in which it is revealed that nothing was as it seemed to Millie. Once Douglas took retribution action against Wendy for having an affair, she began putting into motion a complicated, long-term plan to kill him and get all his money. Millie finds that she was a pawn in this plan all along. Millie is forced to enact her own plan of revenge to get justice against Wendy and her partner-in-crime, the man with whom she was having the affair.
Analytically speaking, the first question about this novel is whether or not it is necessary to read The Housemaid in order to understand or appreciate her secret. Because the high points of Millie’s backstory are related, it is not a necessity for understanding the events taking place in the sequel. As for appreciation, it can be argued otherwise. The key plot points in this novel are emotionally driven by the story of Millie’s past. At its most elemental level, the story is about domestic abuse. More to the point, it is about the perspective of expectations of abuse. Millie’s tenure as a simple housekeeper turns into near-tragedy for her—and outright tragedy for others—for one single reasons. She never questions that Wendy is a victim. This speaks to the general consensus that the party in a marriage in which abuse takes place is almost always the female. Wendy not only recognizes this propensity but takes masterful advantage of it in order to play upon Millie’s emotional baggage and manipulate her.
Enough information about that baggage is provided to explain on a narrative level why and how Millie could be so easily influenced. Her desire to help Wendy out of a dangerous situation is deep-seated and so the more a reader knows about her past the greater the contextual understanding of the story will be. The book treads tricky ground because it is about how some women might use the advantage of easily assumed victimization to carry out their own abuse against the men in their lives. Situating this as a plot twist serves to ease some of the discomfort one might feel toward this situation. In addition, it absolutely helps that both Wendy and Douglas are flawed individuals who both could easily be accepted as abusers and victims. The key to appreciating this novel lies in the acceptance that the issue of domestic abuse may not always be quite as clear-cut as it seems. That may be a difficult hill to climb for some readers.
