Excerpt: 'Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal'

After Julie Metz's husband, Henry, died of a heart attack, she shut down emotionally and left it to her friends to clean out his desk. Not wanting to hurt her further, they kept secret what they found in his possessions.

As Metz coped with her loss, she became friendly with an artist acquaintance of Henry's. When Tomas hinted that Henry had another life, Metz began to dig for the truth. Before long, she was contacting every woman she learned had had a relationship with her husband.

Read an excerpt of "Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal" below and head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.

PART ONE

One January 8-12, 2003

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It happened like this: Henry's footsteps on the old wooden floorboards. The toilet flushing. More footsteps, perhaps on the stairs. Silence. Then the thud.

I was working downstairs in my office on a bitterly cold Wednesday afternoon.

My workspace was an enclosed sunporch off our living room, the small-paned windows on three sides framing a view of the snowy hills across the road. Wrapped in a shawl,wearing fuzzy socks on my chilled feet, I continued studying the project on my computer screen. I had been a graphic designer for nearly twenty years, a freelancer, specializing in cover designs for book publishers. Today's project was a novel about hard-luck cowboys, due yesterday, as always. I stopped fiddling with type design possibilities as I glanced at the computer clock—in an hour I would have to make a dash out to the car to pick up our six-and a half-year-old daughter Liza just before school let out at 3:10.