spending the night with Edie, Susan enters Edie's home uninvited with the pretense of borrowing sugar. While inside, she accidentally knocks over a candle, which sets fire to the entire house. Susan flees the scene, leaving behind her glass measuring cup. Though wracked with guilt, Susan is relieved to learn that Mike was not the man with whom Edie was fornicating. Meanwhile, Lynette, a former career woman, is frustrated with raising four young children while her husband, Tom (Doug Savant), is constantly away on business. Bree, a perfectionist homemaker who feels unappreciated by her family, is troubled when her husband Rex (Steven Culp) asks for a divorce. She poisons him by mistakenly putting onions, to which he is deathly allergic, in his salad. At the hospital, Rex accuses Bree of being emotionally unavailable and obsessed with achieving domestic perfection. Elsewhere, Gabrielle, a former model, grows increasingly unhappy with her marriage to Carlos (Ricardo Antonio Chavira), who buys her love with extravagant gifts. She continues an affair with her sixteen-year-old gardener, John Rowland (Jesse Metcalfe). Paul asks Susan, Lynette, Bree, and Gabrielle to sort through Mary Alice's belongings, as he cannot bear to do so himself. In a box of Mary Alice's clothes, the women discover a blackmail note reading "I know what you did[.] It makes me sick[.] I'm going to tell[.]" The postmark indicates that Mary Alice received it the day she killed herself and the women begin to wonder what secret their friend could have been keeping. Production Creation and development In 2002, Marc Cherry was in a precarious financial situation and was having trouble finding a job. He commented, "I was broke, unable to get even an interview for a writing job, and seriously concerned about my future. I had just turned forty and was starting to wonder if I was one of those deluded writers that wander around Hollywood, convincing themselves they're talented when all the evidence points to the contrary." While watching television coverage of the Andrea Yates trials with his mother, Cherry turned to her and asked, "Can you imagine being so desperate that you would do that to your children?" to which his mother replied, "I've been there." Cherry was intrigued by the idea that a "perfectly sane, rational woman could have the life she wanted, being a wife and mother ... and still have moments of insanity;" he began writing the pilot