Mathilde and Lotto elope in Maine after knowing each other for only two weeks.

Lotto watches his father Gawain collapse and die of an aneurysm in the family driveway.

After six failing years as an actor, Lotto decides to become a playwright at Mathilde's urging.

Lotto's playwriting career earns strong reviews, and he and Mathilde buy a country house with his earnings.

Lotto falls down airplane stairs returning from Japan, becomes dependent on alcohol, and stops writing.

Lotto forms an intense emotional bond with composer Leo Sen while collaborating on an opera at an artist colony.

Ariel publicly reveals at a memorial gala that he was Mathilde's first sexual partner, shattering Lotto's ideal of her purity.

Lotto dies of an aneurysm, his final thoughts consumed by a delirious imagined swim out to sea.

Young Aurelie's parents permanently abandon her after her baby brother falls down the stairs and dies.

Mathilde deliberately gets Bridget drunk to remove her as an obstacle, then engineers her first meeting with Lotto at a cast party.

Mathilde secretly rewrites Lotto's debut play and finances its production by blackmailing her uncle to sell a stolen painting.

Mathilde delivers incriminating photos of Chollie's sexual affairs at his own party, and his wife Danica leaves him immediately.

Rachel and Sallie hand Mathilde photos and an adoption certificate proving Land is Lotto's secret biological son.

Mathilde hands an FBI agent files of evidence to destroy Chollie's career and strip him of his finances.

In old age, Mathilde sits in her London apartment drinking tea, regretting she never let anyone truly know her.

Lotto and Mathilde's marriage begins impulsively and survives poverty, but only because Mathilde secretly engineers nearly every success her husband enjoys. His playwriting career flourishes while their bond is tested by his emotional straying toward a young composer at an artist colony. The marriage fractures when Mathilde's hidden past is publicly exposed, and Lotto dies before they can reconcile. In the second half of the novel, Mathilde's perspective reveals the full depth of her sacrifices and manipulations, from funding Lotto's debut play through blackmail to systematically destroying his childhood best friend Chollie. The novel ends with Mathilde in old age, finally at peace but regretting she never allowed anyone to truly know her.

The headline events of Mathilde and Lotto's marriage, from elopement to aftermath.

Lotto discovers the corpse of a bullied classmate hanging in a closet at his New Hampshire boarding school.

The dean of Lotto's boarding school molests him during an already fragile period of adjustment.

Mathilde gets Lotto a Shiba Inu puppy he names God in an effort to pull him from his post-accident depression.

Feeling abandoned when Lotto extends his colony stay through Thanksgiving, Mathilde impulsively flies to Thailand alone.

Lotto finally earns his first positive review from notoriously harsh critic Phoebe Delmar for his play Eschatology.

Lotto presents one of Mathilde's personal anecdotes as his own story at a reunion, and she seethes with jealousy.

Mathilde walks through Boston after Lotto's death and a friend tells her she looks furiously angry rather than old.

Lotto's friends and family fly in from around the world to mourn alongside Mathilde after his sudden death.

Chollie reveals to Mathilde that his sister Gwennie's death was a suicide, not the accidental overdose everyone believed.

Aurelie finds her Parisian grandmother strangled to death at home and is immediately flown to live in America.

Aurelie reinvents herself as Mathilde at an American school, deliberately erasing her French accent and shameful past.

Land, a young admirer of Lotto's plays, arrives at Mathilde's pool while she is in grief and she ends up sleeping with him.

Mathilde takes a job at Ariel's gallery to keep Lotto's household financially afloat during his acting drought.

An elderly Mathilde visits the dying Ariel in hospital and holds his hand in a final act of closure.

Mathilde hires a brash, tattooed private investigator to dig up incriminating evidence against Chollie.

Behind the main arc of the marriage sit a series of formative and devastating secondary events that illuminate how Lotto and Mathilde became who they are. Lotto's boarding school years are marked by trauma far beyond simple mischief, while Mathilde makes secret reproductive choices that permanently alter the course of their partnership. After Lotto's death, Mathilde's grief is witnessed by those around her as fury rather than sorrow, and the origins of her isolation are traced back to her harrowing childhood in Paris and Pennsylvania. Land's arrival and Mathilde's casual intimacy with him proves more meaningful than her countless other encounters, and her final closure with the dying Ariel reveals how thoroughly her past relationships outlasted her marriage.

The hidden moments and secondary shocks that quietly shaped two lives.

Lotto is sent to a New Hampshire boarding school as punishment after being charged with arson alongside beach punks.

Lotto and Mathilde struggle for years in a cramped West Village apartment as his acting career goes nowhere.

Leo plays Lotto the aria he has poured himself into, and Lotto cannot hide his disappointment; Leo flees the colony.

Mathilde secretly reads Lotto's shelved opera manuscript, The Antigonad, while he is out of the house.

Lotto makes tone-deaf comments about women's roles at a theater symposium, causing an angry Mathilde to walk out mid-speech.

Lotto bases a murderer character in one of his plays on Mathilde's personality, sparking a hysterical argument between them.

Antoinette phones Mathilde shortly after the elopement and demands she leave Lotto; Mathilde vows to keep them apart for years.

Mathilde crashes her car late at night, nearly bites through her tongue, and bleeds on the grass realizing her life is half over.

Teenage Mathilde meets Ariel on a train to New York City, and he eventually pays for her college in exchange for sexual access.

Chollie follows Mathilde from Penn Station and discovers she is Ariel's kept girlfriend before she has ever met Lotto.

Mathilde searches the house in the morning and finds Lotto slumped dead at his attic studio desk.

Chollie confronts Mathilde at her pool six months after Lotto's death and admits he orchestrated Ariel's revelation at the gala.

Mathilde secretly befriends Lotto's harshest critic, Phoebe Delmar, at a party, quietly helping to shift her view of his work.

Mathilde burns the box of Antoinette's surveillance photos and feels her long-held vendetta against Chollie dissolve.

In her final years, Mathilde reconciles with the uncertainty of whether her baby brother's fall down the stairs was truly accidental.

Beneath the surface of Lotto and Mathilde's marriage lies a series of pivotal turning points that neither fully shared with the other. Lotto's troubled adolescence and Mathilde's secret reproductive choices shaped the partnership's fundamental limits, while her covert manipulation of his career and his mother ensured his success came at her invisible expense. The novel's second half reframes everything, revealing that Mathilde engineered their first meeting, that Chollie had long known her secret, and that Antoinette had been quietly surveilling her for years. Mathilde's revenge on Chollie provides her first sense of purpose since Lotto's death, but it is her final reckoning with the death of her baby brother that allows her to begin forgiving herself. Only in accepting her own flawed self does Mathilde find the peace that eluded her throughout the marriage.

The key decisions, buried secrets, and emotional revelations that defined the marriage.