A grocery receipt. Two boxes of soy milk. A birthday candle shaped like the number seven.Claire Sharma is an architect. She builds things that hold. She checks every load-bearing wall, every joint, every assumption. So when she finds a receipt in her husband's blazer pocket - a receipt for a family that is not hers - she does what she has always done. She starts with the evidence.What she finds will dismantle everything she thought she had built.Aarav Mehta has a gift. He makes every woman in his life feel like the only one. He has a wife in Kothrud and a wife in the new city, children he photographs in a hidden folder labelled Work Expenses, and a watch he wears to both homes. He is not a monster. He is something more dangerous than that - a man who genuinely believes he loves every person he has deceived.But Meera Kothari, the first wife, already knows.She has known for three years. She has spent those three years building something of her own - a network of domestic helps who are also her informants, an encrypted phone, a plan that is no longer entirely about justice. Meera has been waiting so long for the right moment that she can no longer be certain whether she is seeking it or creating it. And now a second woman has walked into the middle of her plan.Two women. One husband. One city.And a detective from the Women's Grievance Cell who has seen four bigamy cases this year alone, who told Claire on their first meeting that in her experience, the first wife is either a saint or a surgeon - and that there is no in-between."The Second Wife" is a domestic suspense novel set in Pune, about the architecture of lies, the patience required to survive them, and what happens when two women decide - separately, dangerously - that they have been patient long enough.