Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts

Monday, April 23, 2012

What would you do?


What would you do if you saw your husband kissing your sister? Really kissing her with his hands in all the wrong places?

In my new mystery, Murder in The Buff, Molly Darter handled that scenario by throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down at her husband. She kicked him out of their home. She quit speaking to her sister.

She knew what she saw. Her eyes didn’t lie. Worse, her husband looked guilty. He tried to talk to her about it but she couldn’t stand to be around him. Every time she saw him that kiss of betrayal flashed in her head again.

Molly and Hadley’s marriage is a rich vein of conflict in this mystery. It echoes the theme of broken relationships that come into play in the murder plot. Love and murder – it just doesn’t get any better than that in my mind.

I write about people who make mistakes because I’m curious about human behavior. Love can be very messy.

Some people honor their romantic commitments. Some people cheat. Some cheaters fall apart when they get caught. (What were they thinking?) In real life, these things never end well. Arguments get nastier. Lines get drawn in the sand. Hurt pride rears its ugly head. Outsiders take sides. No one can back down.

This type of emotional conflict is great fuel for a story, plus as an author, I get to create the ending I want. That’s the beauty of fiction.

But I’m curious as to how you might handle a situation like this in real life or in the pages of a book. Would you go all ballistic? Would you withdraw and cry out your hurt all alone? Would you get even? Would you listen to what your spouse had to say?

Would your answer have been different twenty years ago?

What would you do?

Maggie Toussaint
Puzzling her way through life