The Woman in the Cabin

In a cabin deep in the Scottish Highlands, Mary is up before dawn to cook from scratch, tend the garden and feed the animals. In the evening she has dinner ready for her husband Cal, puts on the lipstick he likes, and tells him she has missed him. It is not true, and he knows it, and he likes hearing it anyway.

Lately she has been noticing her first wrinkles, and Cal has been noticing them too: a scowl when dinner runs late, a grip on her arm that is harder than it needs to be. Meanwhile fragments of her life before the cabin have started coming back to her.

Then she finds a stack of letters under the floorboards, describing days almost identical to her own and addressed "To the next woman." Becca Day's book turns on the obvious implication and the one that follows it: if Mary is not the first, what became of the woman before her, and how much time is left before someone writes a letter like this to whoever comes after Mary.