Darling Venom

Thirteen-year-old Charlotte Richards watches her older sister Leah leave for a college party with her boyfriend Phil, ignoring Charlotte's pleas and dismissing "penny," the sisters' safe word. The moment foreshadows the fracture between them and introduces the penny as a recurring symbol of trust.

A year later, on Valentine's Day, her birthday, Charlotte rides the subway to St. Paul, the Manhattan prep school she attends on scholarship. Her parents died in a house fire before Christmas, and Leah, who dropped out of college to raise her, has forgotten the day. Charlotte climbs to the six-story roof intending to jump, then spots a hooded figure on the ledge and shouts "Don't!"

The figure is Kellan Marchetti, whose mother died of an overdose and whose father is novelist Terrence "Terry" Marchetti, author of The Imperfections. Kellan resents his older half-brother Tate, a young doctor who has custody of him, believing Tate separated him from Terry. Charlotte and Kellan share a beer and trade tragedies. When Charlotte nearly slips off the roof and panics, Kellan observes that her fear proves she does not truly want to die. They make a pact: Every Valentine's Day until graduation, they will meet on this rooftop, each promising advance notice before any suicide attempt. Kellan insists Charlotte never speak to him publicly at school.

Over the next three years, they sustain a clandestine friendship through annual rooftop meetings and exchanged books. Charlotte's suicidal thoughts lessen, but Kellan's do not. At sixteen, Charlotte secretly kisses Mark MacGowan, a jock whose father has a feud with Terry; Kellan's perspective reveals that Mark targeted Charlotte as revenge against the Marchetti family. When Charlotte mentions Mark, Kellan storms off. Charlotte ends things with Mark publicly. At seventeen, Kellan kisses Charlotte passionately, calls her "Venom," and warns this is "not the beginning of something" but "the end." Charlotte breaks their rules by writing to the principal about her concern that Kellan is suicidal. Kellan discovers she reported him, blocks her number, and cancels their next meeting.

On Charlotte's eighteenth birthday, Leah tells Charlotte she sometimes wishes Charlotte had never been born, then sends her on an errand that makes Charlotte forty minutes late to the rooftop. She arrives to find police outside St. Paul. An officer confirms a young person has died. Charlotte collapses and finds a penny on the ground: Kellan's final goodbye.

Four years later, Charlotte is 22 and working as an assistant at Rothschild Literary. Her boss, Reagan Rothschild, sends her to schedule an appointment with a specialist who turns out to be Dr. Tatum Marchetti, Kellan's half-brother. Charlotte barges into his office and tells Tate that Kellan hated him enough to choose death over living under his roof. Tate, realizing she knew Kellan, pursues her.

Tate pressures Charlotte into meeting him. She offers a partial truth about her friendship with Kellan while concealing the rooftop pact and their romantic feelings. Tate counters with revelations that dismantle everything Kellan believed: Terry never fought for custody but abandoned Kellan on Tate's doorstep while pursuing a fling. Terry supplied Kellan with drugs. Tate broke off his engagement to Hannah because she wanted to send Kellan to military school. Charlotte realizes Kellan's understanding of Tate was distorted by Terry's lies.

Their bond deepens. Tate reveals that Kellan received an early-decision acceptance from Harvard, destabilizing Charlotte's understanding of why Kellan chose to die. He asks Charlotte to help clean Kellan's bedroom, sealed for four years. Charlotte confesses her deepest secret: At thirteen, she stole one of Leah's cigarettes, thought she extinguished it, and threw it in a trash can full of flammable products. The fire killed her parents, and Leah ran through the flames to save Charlotte, sustaining severe burns. They find two locked drawers in Kellan's desk but lack the keys.

Terry, now homeless, moves into Tate's house and breaks into one of the locked drawers, finding a manuscript titled Darling Venom. During a confrontation, he confesses that he plagiarized The Imperfections. Meanwhile, after a fight with Leah, Charlotte discovers Kellan's letter hidden on Leah's bookshelf. Leah admits Kellan delivered it the night he died but never passed it on.

On the St. Paul rooftop, Charlotte reads the letter. Kellan tells her not to blame herself, reveals he has been cutting himself, and challenges her to finish the manuscript in his locked drawers. The letter contains the keys. Charlotte retrieves Darling Venom from Tate's house and discovers it is a love story between fictionalized versions of herself and Kellan, complete with a happy ending he invented. Margin notes addressed to her by name, time-stamped from the day after they met, prove Kellan planned his death from the beginning. She also realizes Kellan applied to Harvard solely to get a professor's feedback on the manuscript, never intending to attend.

Charlotte enlists Terry to help edit the manuscript behind Tate's back. Over weeks of collaboration, Terry transforms into a focused, animated partner. Charlotte learns that Terry gave Kellan's mother the drugs that killed her, left her body for Kellan to find, and abandoned Kellan because he could not bear to look at his own son.

Charlotte and Tate's relationship becomes romantic and sexual, but Tate refuses to see Charlotte in public or say he loves her. Tate visits Leah without Charlotte's knowledge and confronts Leah for mistreating Charlotte, pointing out that the fire was partly Leah's fault for leaving cigarettes and flammable materials accessible. Jonah, Charlotte's neighbor and a single father interested in Leah, overhears and pledges to care for her. He tells Leah that scars are "the armor beauty wears," and the two begin a relationship. The sisters reconcile, restoring the penny tradition.

Charlotte reaches her breaking point when Tate still refuses to acknowledge their relationship. She accuses him of using Kellan as an excuse to avoid vulnerability, leaves him the key to Kellan's second desk drawer, and walks away.

Tate spirals. Terry directs his attention to a poster Charlotte hung above Tate's bed, a passage from Darling Venom in which Kellan writes that he hates Tate "in the way you hate milk growing up, knowing it's good for you yet unable to stomach the taste" and admits he loves his brother. Tate reads the entire novel in one sitting. Using Charlotte's key, he opens the second drawer and finds two pennies and a photograph of himself and Kellan. He listens to Kellan's voicemail, recorded the night Kellan died, in which Kellan asks Tate to watch over Charlotte: "I might even like you a little."

Charlotte finishes editing Darling Venom and sells the rights, negotiating a Valentine's Day release to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Kellan's death. All proceeds will go to the New York Society Library under Kellan's name. On February 14th, Charlotte visits Kellan's grave, then climbs to the rooftop and finds Tate holding a carrot cake. He tells her she is "the thing that keeps me going" and says, "I love you, Charlotte Richards."

In the epilogue, Tate proposes on the St. Paul rooftop with a black diamond ring. One year later, Charlotte is pregnant. Terry, now sober, accepts an award for Darling Venom and publicly confesses that he plagiarized The Imperfections from Kellan, revealing his own son wrote the book the world celebrated as Terry's masterpiece. Darling Venom has sold over ten million copies.