A Real-Life Assassination Inspired Thriller “We Would Never” — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

Sometimes, real life is stranger than fiction — and it's even better when one leads to the other.

Bestselling author Tova Mirvis got the idea for her new slow-burn, literary thriller from the 2014 assassination of a Miami family doctor that she followed in the midst of her own divorce proceedings. According to her publisher, Mirvis "became obsessed with the idea of comfort and confines of family and community," which led to her newest book. Billed as tailor-made for fans of Big Little Lies and Little Monsters, Mirvis' We Would Never (out Feb. 11) follows the extremes families will go to in an effort to protect one of their own.

When Hailey Gelman comes under suspicion for her soon-to-be-ex husband Jonah's murder, she couldn't be more surprised. They'd spent the previous months locked in a bitter custody battle over their daughter, Maya, followed by Jonah's retaliation after Hailey filed a motion to relocate to Florida to be near family. And now he's dead, and the family is spinning out of control.

Hooked yet? Read on for an exclusive excerpt, below.

“You haven’t done this just for me. I would have backed down a long time ago. How many times did you try to convince me to keep going? Sometimes I think you hate him more than I do,” Hailey said.

She waited for her mother’s response, expecting an eruption of pain, a thundering of anger, but Sherry spoke in a voice that was strangely ice-cold and calm.

“If someone hurt Maya, you would hate that person the way I hate Jonah.”

Hailey hung up before her mother said more. Her body was shaking. She’d never spoken to her mother like that. She went into the bathroom so Maya wouldn’t see her in this state. In the mirror, she looked wild, her face flushed with heat, her hair loose. Furious, and also free. It was the same tangle of feelings she had after a fight with Jonah, when the rush of adrenaline made her believe that nothing existed beyond this anger.

“Mommy?” she heard from the other side of the door.

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Hailey called out that she was coming and pressed a cold washcloth to her face. She practiced a smile in the mirror, ready to recite the lines she had perfected: It’s all fine and Mommy is just tired and Mommy just has a little cold.

“It’s time to go to Daddy’s house,” Hailey announced when she left the bathroom — she sounded like one of the maniacally happy characters on the shows Maya watched.

In the car, at least, Maya couldn’t get a good look at her face. Maybe when Maya was an adult, she would tell her the truth. How getting divorced felt like being cast out of your own life and being dropped in the middle of an always shifting wilderness. That to be around Jonah made her want to escape her own body, how in every conversation with him, she marveled at how love could turn into a dark oozing hate.

When Hailey pulled into Jonah’s driveway, she texted him that they were outside and waited in the car until he came to the front door. Not once had she gone inside to witness the alternate reality of a separate bedroom in which Maya slept, separate toys with which she played. Sometimes it seemed like there were two Mayas; as soon as she walked through Jonah’s front door, she became the other. A week earlier, Hailey dreamt that she’d forced her way into Jonah’s house, but couldn’t find Maya in a maze of rooms. She frantically searched until she came upon a little girl in an enormous room — not Maya, but someone who looked like her, wearing her clothes, sitting on a bed, brushing a doll’s hair.

When Jonah came to the door, she helped Maya out of the car and they walked up the front steps. It was better to have no moment in which she and Jonah were together without Maya’s presence to enforce the peace, but Maya ran inside quickly, leaving her alone with Jonah.

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Do not say a word. Get back into the car and drive away. She knew this, but Jonah was lingering in the doorway, watching her with a look of satisfaction.

“I can’t believe you actually filed that motion,” Hailey said.

Jonah took a step closer to her. “We both know every word of it is true,” he said.

“Why does it have to be this way? Why are you doing this?”

“Did you really think you were going to try to bribe me and it was just going to blow over?”

“It wasn’t a bribe.”

He laughed. “Please, enlighten me. I would love to hear how the Marcus family is pretending that they didn’t do something that we all know they did.”

“I’m sorry, okay? It was a bad idea to offer the money, but it wasn’t a bribe and no one is trying to take Maya from you,” she said.

“This is so like your mother. It’s so like all of you. You’re not going to stop until Maya is all yours. I’m just surprised they told you about the bribe. You know that’s the real issue, don’t you? Poor Hailey can’t take care of herself. They have to come to your rescue.”

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She wanted to throw something at him. She wanted to hit him. “You left me. You just decided it. You decided everything for us.”

And here they were again. She was wrong to think that the wounds were starting to heal. They were still locked in battle, different words perhaps, but the same fury.

“I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m sorry. What did you want me to do? Pretend for the rest of my life?” he said.

What did she want? To travel back in time and never have married him? To return to the moment when she had doubted their relationship and this time choose to run? Faced with the impossibility, she felt only the prospect of a dead end. From inside the house, Maya was calling to Jonah and he went back inside. The one who had Maya was the winner, and she wanted to break down his door, grab her, and never return.

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Hailey ran from the porch, back down the driveway. Was it even Jonah she was most furious at? The strands of her anger were all knotted together and she couldn’t pick them apart. As she tried to catch her breath, she noticed Jonah’s gray CR-V parked in front of her car. She looked down at her hands and at the set of keys she was holding — both her hands and the keys seemed not to belong to her anymore. She grasped the keys more vigorously, until her fingers felt their painful imprint on her skin. She walked closer to the car and stared with a kind of puzzlement. She wasn’t doing this, yet a hand was reaching out and keys were scratching the driver’s-side door until two long silvery lines appeared.

At the sight of them, she released her grip on the keys and gaped in a kind of wonder. For an instant, she imagined the car might bleed.

She looked up and there was Jonah’s neighbor in his own driveway, watching her. For a moment, they locked eyes. For a moment, she had the impulse to show him the marks on her hand, to point to the scratches on the car. But no, that was a terrible idea. She looked again at the scratches and had the impossible thought that she could run her hands over them and erase what she’d done.

It came over her. She wished Jonah were dead. If that were to somehow happen, she wouldn’t feel a thing.

From WE WOULD NEVER: A Novel by Tova Mirvis. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

We Would Never by Tova Mirvis goes on sale Feb. 11 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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