American South, 1950s. Cassie, an East Asian waitress at the Blue Bayou diner in the Louisiana bayou, is rescued one summer night by archaeologist Joseph Dubois, who drives off a group of white men harassing her and takes her and her young son Len to the Dubois mansion. There, she reveals her true identity: she is Suhyang, a Korean mudang, and her son's real name is Seongho. Abandoned by her broker and forced to give birth alone, Suhyang had found shelter with Korean immigrants she believed to be her people — until the ghosts warned her they were traffickers. She fled with five-year-old Seongho, changed their names, and disappeared into the bayou. But the Dubois mansion harbors a malevolent spirit in its sealed west wing, and Joseph has been repeating "exorcism contract marriages" with foreign mudangs to break the curse. When Seongho is attacked by the spirit, Suhyang's grief-resonance shakes the mansion to its foundations — and the wives unite. Each month, a 200-year-old masked ball returns to life, revealing buried secrets. But a KKK raid brings everything to a head: Joseph is killed. The surviving wives found the Wives Corporation — and Suhyang begins to see visions of the still-young Masaki…

Wives is the sequel to Husbands, in which Suhyang carved her path through a world in upheaval through sheer force of will. This volume extends her story onto another stage of violence: the postwar American South. Here, Suhyang confronts head-on the othering gaze, the binding contracts, and the constraints attached to the name "wife" — and turns them, at last, into a banner of solidarity. The haunted mansion and its repeating curse are not mere horror devices but mirrors that force a reckoning with women's wounds and historical sins; and before those mirrors, Suhyang and the wives refuse to be used. They become the authors of their own story. Where Husbands was a narrative of desire and awakening, Wives is an epic of female solidarity and salvation — the invention of how to survive together, even after loss.