The Other Man (John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette, and Me)

Would she be alive today? Would we be together? Would we have been happy?

Before she was Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr. — before the wedding dress, the cameras, the mythology — Carolyn Bessette was a woman of remarkable presence. Independent, stylish, and far more complex than the tabloids ever allowed her to be.

She was also, for a time, deeply in love with someone other than America's most eligible bachelor.

Michael Bergin was a small-town kid from Connecticut who came to New York with nothing and became one of the most recognizable faces in the world. When he and Carolyn found each other in 1992, it was immediate and intense — a connection neither of them could fully let go of, even as their lives pulled them in different directions. Then John Kennedy walked in.

But this is not a story that ends with a wedding.

In The Other Man, Bergin breaks his silence on one of the most talked-about relationships of the 1990s, offering an intimate glimpse into the private Carolyn so few people were permitted to see — her warmth, her restlessness, her contradictions — and the passion the two of them shared long after the world had written its own version of her story.

Honest, tender, and at times devastating, The Other Man is a testament to the pull of a love that doesn't follow the script — and a portrait of a woman who deserved to be known on her own terms.