When The Pilot’s Wife begins, Kathryn Lyons is devastated by the loss of her husband, Jack. She believes she and Jack had a good marriage, despite the distance that had grown between them over the years. Kathryn is adamant, up until Muire’s disclosure, that Jack could not be having an affair: “How devastatingly complete her trust in him had been” (224). Even after she finds out about his relationship with Muire, she initially believes it was just an affair. However, over the course of the novel, Kathryn is forced to question her relationship with Jack more fundamentally and, in the end, realize that Muire, and not Kathryn, is the pilot’s wife. Kathryn is forced to reconsider her identity as apart from Jack’s.

Before Kathryn finds out about Muire, she excuses the distance in her marriage as inevitable, “simply the normal course of events with a couple who’d been married for a decade” (267). She sees their lack of closeness as a natural development, believing that it is par for the course to ”live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less” (107). However, as the novel continues, the extent of the distance between Kathryn and Jack is revealed in such a way that Kathryn cannot deny that there is more to it.