Bert Cousins arrives uninvited at baby Franny's christening party, and Fix reluctantly allows him inside.

Bert kisses Beverly Keating at the christening party while searching the house for baby Franny.

Bert and Beverly begin an affair, divorce their spouses, marry each other, and relocate to Virginia.

The six Keating-Cousins step-siblings spend summers together in Virginia, bonded by shared resentment of their parents.

The children give Albie Benadryl disguised as candy so he falls asleep before their walk to the lake.

Cal is stung by a bee during a Virginia visit and dies because his Benadryl had been given to Albie.

Caroline coaches the children to lie to adults, hiding the Benadryl pills and the stolen gun from their account.

Twenty-four-year-old Franny, having dropped out of law school, meets famous author Leon Posen while waitressing in Chicago.

Leon Posen publishes a bestselling novel called Commonwealth, drawn from stories Franny shared about her blended family childhood.

Albie receives a free copy of Leon's novel while working as a bike messenger and recognizes his own drugged childhood in its pages.

Albie confronts Franny at Leon's summer house and forces her to acknowledge that Leon exploited their family story.

Fix, Franny, and Caroline attend the film adaptation of Commonwealth on Fix's birthday; Fix grows distraught and demands to leave.

The Keatings drive to Torrance and bring Teresa to the hospital after finding her suffering alone at home.

Teresa dies in the hospital after the Keatings bring her in for treatment.

Franny slips away from Beverly's Christmas party to visit Bert and reflects on a private memory she never shared with Leon.

The novel opens at a christening party where Bert Cousins's uninvited arrival and stolen kiss set the collapse of two marriages in motion. Bert and Beverly's affair and remarriage bind the Keating and Cousins children into uneasy summers in Virginia, where drugging the youngest child leads indirectly to Cal's death from a bee sting. The children conspire to hide the truth from their parents, and the guilt of that silence quietly shapes all of their futures. Decades later, Franny's stories about her childhood become the source material for Leon Posen's bestselling novel, a betrayal that Albie ultimately forces her to confront. The families reconvene as aging parents face illness and death, and the weight of their shared history is finally measured. Franny ends the novel by privately holding onto one memory she chose never to surrender to anyone else's telling.

The defining events of two families reshaped by an uninvited kiss.

Neighbors bring oranges and alcohol to share, transforming the christening party into an overflowing neighborhood celebration.

Father Joe Mike, drunk at the party, compares the miraculous flow of gin and juice to the Biblical miracle of loaves and fish.

Fix tells Franny during chemotherapy that he knew Bert before Beverly did, a detail Franny had never heard before.

Fix recounts his close friendship with police partner Lomer, who was shot and killed at a gas station.

Teresa, newly single with four children, takes a secretary job at the DA's office and enrolls in night school to become a paralegal.

The Cousins children begin flying alone from California to Virginia for summer visits, relishing the freedom of being between two worlds.

Beverly retreats to her suffocatingly hot parked car to escape the noise of six children overwhelming the Virginia house.

Bert strikes Cal across the face when Cal suggests Beverly sit next to Albie during the drive to Lake Anna.

Franny helps the very drunk Leon Posen navigate several hotel floors before finally locating his room at the Palmer House.

Fix and Bert, despite their mutual resentment, both agree that Caroline and Franny should pursue careers in law.

Fix fails the California bar exam three times; Caroline later scores 177 out of 180 on her LSAT.

Albie and his neighborhood friends form the Goddamn Boys on Bikes and escalate from reckless riding to setting deliberate fires.

Albie and his friends set a fire in the high school art room that burns out of control, resulting in his expulsion.

Albie arrives unannounced at Jeanette's Brooklyn apartment after eight years of no contact with his family.

Bert tells Franny he has been unable to reconnect with Albie; Franny urges him to keep trying.

Behind the major turning points of the novel, smaller but significant moments reveal how each character navigates their fractured life. The christening party swells into a neighborhood celebration through shared oranges and alcohol, while Fix processes his past through stories of his murdered police partner, told to Franny during chemotherapy. Teresa quietly rebuilds her life after the divorce, and the children find unexpected freedom in their unescorted plane journeys between parents. As Franny enters adulthood, Fix and Bert unexpectedly agree on her professional future, while Albie's destructive path through adolescence lands him first in Virginia and then in Brooklyn. The pool ends with Franny reconnecting with Bert at his home and urging him toward a reconciliation with his estranged son Albie.

The smaller moments that filled the spaces between the headline events.

At the christening party, Fix suggests Bert name his unborn child Albert; Bert's wife Teresa later softens the name to Albie.

Fix watches Bert and Beverly juice oranges side by side and privately suspects they have developed a secret understanding.

Fix confesses to Franny that his memory of Lomer's shooting is unreliable—his mind falsely places Mercado at the scene.

Leon calls Franny two weeks after their first meeting and invites her to attend his reading in Iowa City.

Teresa gathers her children months after Cal's death and demands they tell her exactly what happened that day.

Jeanette's husband Fodé welcomes Albie into the crowded Brooklyn apartment and tells him he can stay for as long as he needs.

Beverly discovers Bert is having an affair in the aftermath of Cal's death but remains in the marriage for six more years.

Franny carries six boxes of lobsters to the fishing pier and releases them into the ocean in a silent act of defiance.

Fix asks Franny privately to use his old police gun to end his life; Franny refuses and removes the gun from his room.

Franny dreams of Holly revealing that Franny was the child left alone with Cal's body who quietly took the gun from his sock.

Holly discovers meditation after mishearing her doctor's recommendation and eventually settles permanently at a Zen center in Switzerland.

Teresa retires from work and travels to Switzerland to visit Holly at the Zen center for the first time.

During meditation, Teresa sees a vision of everything that happened the day Cal died, and then his spirit rushes back into her arms.

Franny crawls into Albie's outdoor sleeping bag on a cold night rather than force the troubled teenager to come inside alone.

Standing on Bert's porch, Franny realizes she never told Leon the story of the sleeping bag, and she is glad to have kept it.

Beneath the surface of Commonwealth's events lies a series of decisions and revelations that quietly shift the entire story. From Fix's private suspicion at the christening party to his later confession of a flawed memory, the novel tracks how imperfect perception shapes the stories people tell about the past. Key turning points include Teresa's demand for the truth about Cal's death, Franny's silent act of releasing the lobsters, and Fix's desperate request that Franny help him die. A dreamlike sequence reveals that Franny herself concealed the gun from Cal's body, adding a new layer to the children's shared guilt. Teresa's final days are redeemed through a meditation vision in which she is reunited with her dead son Cal. The novel closes with Franny standing on Bert's porch, protecting a small private memory she chose never to surrender to anyone else's story.

The hidden truths, private decisions, and emotional turning points of the story.