Wife Number Seven by Melissa Brown
Prologue
I always knew I would share my husband.
I was four when my father took his second wife, Mother Peg, and seven when Mother Louise joined our family. He could have stopped then. After all, in our faith, a man could enter heaven as long as he had three wives. But my father didn’t stop there. Next there was Mother Rylee and finally Mother Anne.
I should note that Mother Anne, who is only five years older than me, was just nineteen when she became my fifth mother. The exact age I was when I married Lehi Cluff, when I became his seventh wife.
My mother was a first wife and I had dreamed of becoming a first wife, as well. I dreamed of having a husband all to myself, if only for a little while. Some wives, like my mother, were lucky—she had five blissful years with my father before the prophet’s revelation that he marry Mother Peg. I wanted that too.
Bliss.
It seemed unfathomable.
Instead, I’m wife number seven. My husband shares my bed one night a week. And although I don’t love him, not in the way I’d always hoped I’d love the man I’m bound to for eternity, I find myself dreading the moment he walks out my bedroom door every seven days.
My existence is a lonely one. Lehi relieves that loneliness for the twenty-four hours when I pretend I’m the only one he lays with.
And I do pretend.
Every waking hour.