Husbands & Lovers

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism, racism, abuse, rape, and child loss. Racist language is repeated only within quotation marks in this guide.

Mallory kissed her 10-year-old son, Sam, goodbye when he left for camp, but within a week, they called to tell her that he ingested a poisonous mushroom. On the three-hour drive to the hospital, she hits a baby owl, which gets trapped in her windshield wipers, but she is afraid to stop. Her sister, Paige, arrives shortly after Mallory. Sam is in a coma, fighting for his life. A nurse mentions that he’s a “dead ringer” for a famous musician, and Mallory learns that her son no longer has functioning kidneys. When she returns to her car, she sees the dead owl and thinks of how the bird’s mother doesn’t know what happened to him. She looks down at her golden cobra bracelet, an item Mallory inherited when her mother died a year and a half ago.

Hannah’s husband, Alistair, warned her about cobras when they arrived in Cairo, but she isn’t thinking about the snakes when she goes to the garden behind her hotel. After surviving World War II and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, being bitten by a cobra would be an unexpected way to die.