After you say, “I do,” there’s one more thing you must do. . . .

A propulsive domestic thriller about what it takes to keep marriages together and what will tear them apart from “addictive” (People) author Helen Monks Takhar

This Random House Book Club edition includes an author’s note and a discussion guide.

Nine months into motherhood, Elle is struggling. She’s battling being sidelined at work, fighting to feel at home in her post-baby body and feeling pressure to be intimate with her adoring husband, Dom. Why does everything seem so hard, especially when Dom is such a helpful, hands-on dad as well as an ever-attentive husband?

Elle turns to her charismatic new colleague, Gabriel, to get through the day and red wine to soothe her at night. For a while, the distractions work until one night she wakes up bleary-eyed in a hotel room next to a man who’s not her husband. A dead man who’s not her husband.

Elle realizes Dom is the only person who can help her escape the hotel room with her future intact. She also knows she’d never have found herself next to the dead man if she’d followed The Marriage Rule, the one thing she’s been told a wife needs to do to keep her marriage alive.