Larry and Sally arrive in Depression-era Madison for Larry's first university teaching job, which he regards as a lucky break.

Larry meets Sid and Charity Lang and is immediately overwhelmed by their Harvard backgrounds and easy sophistication.

The Langs host a formal dinner party welcoming the Morgans into the Madison academic community.

Charity delivers her baby on the same day Larry receives word that a publisher has accepted his first novel.

Friends throw Larry an impromptu party to celebrate his novel acceptance, and Sally unexpectedly goes into labor.

Sally undergoes a dangerous breech delivery and gives birth to a daughter who is born with a broken arm.

Larry and Sid learn the university will not promote either of them and instead offers only temporary appointments.

Sally collapses during a walking trip with the Langs and is diagnosed with polio.

In the present day, Hallie and Moe visit the Morgans and disclose that Charity is terminally ill.

The two couples reunite at a postwar dinner party where Sid and Charity quarrel sharply over doing the dishes.

The Morgans and Langs take a joint vacation to Italy, where the couples together navigate Sally's disability.

The Morgans arrive at the Vermont home and Charity beams with uncomplicated joy upon seeing Sally moving toward her on crutches.

The four friends reunite fully and Charity's unexpected vitality overwhelms the pity Larry had prepared to feel.

Charity's condition deteriorates rapidly on her birthday and she argues with Sid about wanting to die away from home.

Sid walks off alone into the dark woods in grief and Larry goes out to search for him.

Larry and Sally Morgan arrive in Depression-era Madison as an impoverished young couple on the margins of academic life, where they fall into the orbit of the wealthier, more sophisticated Sid and Charity Lang. The two couples grow close through shared milestones—novel acceptances, difficult births, professional setbacks—that bind them together even as personal tensions deepen. Sally's diagnosis with polio reshapes the Morgans' lives permanently, while Charity's drive for social and professional respectability strains her marriage to Sid across decades. After years of distance shaped by war, careers, and geography, the two couples reunite in Italy and later in Vermont, where Charity is now terminally ill. The final reunion forces all four characters to confront mortality, loyalty, and the cost of the compromises they have each made. The novel ends not with resolution but with Larry searching for a grief-stricken Sid alone in the dark, the friendship outlasting everything that threatened it.

The headline arc of two couples navigating ambition, illness, and lifelong friendship.

Larry takes a solitary morning walk and meditates on aging, impermanence, and how the world has left marks on him.

Larry and Sally spend their last savings furnishing a cheap Madison apartment while Sally is pregnant.

Larry imagines Sid's courtship visit to Charity's wealthy family estate at Battell Pond, reconstructing an episode he did not witness.

Larry creates a chart dividing his 168 weekly hours to consciously balance writing time with time devoted to Sally.

After Sally's difficult delivery, Charity jokes that the baby's full name will sound like a streetcar: Lang Lang.

Larry and Sid take a boat ride after learning about their denied promotions, and a sudden accident bonds all four friends more deeply.

Larry and Sally separate temporarily; Larry writes a novel quickly but grows lonely and restless during the time apart.

Larry drives through the night to rejoin Sally and the Langs after their period of separation.

America enters the war and Larry relocates to Washington as a journalist, causing the two couples to lose regular contact.

Charity is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown during the wartime years while the couples are separated.

Sally tells Hallie for the first time how Charity and Sid selflessly cared for the Morgans when Sally was hospitalized with polio.

In the present day, Sid and Larry attempt to restart the old Marmon car while debating how to handle Charity's insistence on a picnic.

Charity falls silent in pain during her argument with Sid and Sid quietly relents to her final wishes.

Larry reflects in the dark woods on nearly losing Sally during childbirth and feels flooded with gratitude that she survived.

Larry finally finds Sid standing alone in the dark among the trees.

Beneath the novel's headline events lies a web of smaller but telling moments that reveal how the two couples actually lived together day to day. From Larry's reflective opening walk to the domestic details of furnishing a cheap Madison apartment, these scenes establish the material and emotional texture of the Morgans' early life. Recurring rituals—boating trips, time-management charts, summer house visits—give the friendship its rhythm while also exposing its fault lines. The wartime years pull the couples apart in ways that the novel traces through Charity's breakdown, Larry's journalism, and the long silence between the families. When the present-day reunion finally unfolds, it is Sally's confession to Hallie about the Langs' wartime selflessness that most sharply reframes everything Larry has narrated, revealing blind spots in his memory that neither he nor the reader had fully registered.

The quieter moments and supporting events that give the friendship its texture and depth.

Sally worries before the Langs' party about her dress, revealing her anxiety about fitting into the new academic social world.

At the Langs' dinner party, Sally reads aloud from Homer and the four friends share a spontaneous, joyful group embrace.

Sid reveals that his father actively disapproved of his decision to study English literature, unlike Larry who had no parents to object.

The four friends go ice-skating together and Larry feels awed that the two pregnant women carry four heartbeats between them.

Larry finishes a novel drawn from his parents' deaths and feels guilty for profiting artistically from their tragedy.

During the summer at the Langs' country home, Larry decides to commit fully to a career writing fiction rather than depend on academia.

Larry briefly kisses Alice, a colleague's wife, while separated from Sally and working alone.

At the end of the walking trip, the Langs offer to provide the Morgans housing so Larry can continue writing his next novel.

Hallie tells Larry and Sally that her parents remained utterly co-dependent despite their decades-long conflicts.

In Florence, Larry wakes one morning and suddenly realizes his life has finally come out onto a clear road.

Larry arrives at the Vermont terrace and reads stubborn refusal in Charity's posture before she turns and sees Sally.

The four friends speak candidly about dying and agree there is no adequate literature to prepare a person for death.

Larry realizes that much of the fear he feels standing near Charity's deathbed is in fact fear for his own mortality.

Sid confronts Charity directly, telling her she never honestly discloses to him how she truly feels about her condition.

Larry decides to write about Sid and Charity, finally closing the distance he has kept between his life and his literary work.

Crossing to Safety is built on moments where expectations crack and self-knowledge forces itself forward. From Sally's nervous worry about fitting in before the Langs' first party, to Larry's guilty recognition that he has profited from his parents' deaths, the novel accumulates small but decisive shifts in perspective. Larry's choice to commit fully to writing fiction rather than depend on academia marks one such turning point, while the wartime revelation of Charity's breakdown quietly reframes her as more fragile than her commanding presence suggests. In the present-day sections, Sally's voice emerges as a corrective to Larry's selective memory, and Hallie's candid account of her parents' co-dependence exposes what decades of Larry's narration have obscured. The novel closes not on resolution but on Larry's decision to write about his friends at last, finally closing the distance he has maintained between his life and his work.

The key decisions, discoveries, and emotional reversals that reshape how the characters understand themselves and each other.