How to Survive in the Woods

Emma Sharp, the wealthy founder of a nutrition startup called Vitalist, wakes in an Austin, Texas, hospital after slitting her wrists and is furious to find herself alive. Her rideshare driver, Logan, notices the bandages and tells her she is "not allowed" to die. For the first time in months, the suicidal voice in her head goes silent. Emma has always craved rules, traits her father, Gregory Sharp, instilled at his remote survivalist compound in the California foothills. Instead of taking Emma home, Logan locks the car doors and drives her to breakfast. The narrator observes that the kind of man who forbids you to die will also have ideas about how you should live.

Over the following year, Logan takes control of Emma's diet, friendships, and opinions. She surrenders, viewing his dominance as a cage for her own dangerous instincts. When her friend Shay confronts her about Logan's behavior, Emma severs the friendship. They marry. Logan's control turns violent: He rips a clump of hair from her head, and Emma invents a cover story he eagerly adopts. She tells herself that since being with Logan, no one has tried to kill her, including herself.

Taylor Cognetti, Logan's ex-girlfriend, reenters their lives. Years earlier, Logan sabotaged their shared fitness venture by leaking an intimate video of Taylor, who escaped to Los Angeles and reinvented herself as a life coach. At a party, Taylor tells Emma she knows about Logan's violence. Months later, Taylor kisses Emma. Their affair deepens, and Emma, closeted her entire life, begins to fall in love.

One Saturday, Taylor appears with bruises from Logan, who has been sleeping with her too, choking and striking her during sex. Taylor reveals that Logan expects Emma to attempt suicide again and intends to inherit her money. She proposes an alternative: They will lure Logan into the Maine wilderness and drown him.

Gregory trained Emma from childhood in wilderness survival. Her first love was Mara Valencia, who spent summers on a neighboring ranch near Grass Valley, California. Their relationship ended at Joshua Tree: The morning after Emma found Mara in bed with a man named Jake, they climbed together in silence. At the top, Mara accused Emma of being a control freak and screamed that she had never loved her. When Mara grabbed Emma by the throat, Emma swung a pocket knife. The blade lodged in Mara's neck, and Mara fell to her death. The fall was ruled an accident. Gregory gave Emma seed money for Vitalist, proud of what he saw as proof that survival was her "operating system." When a journalist named Owen Katz later investigated Mara's death, Emma seduced him to suppress the story. Recognizing the monster she had become, she slit her wrists three months later.

Emma, Taylor, and Logan fly to Maine to hike the Hundred Mile Wilderness, the most remote stretch of the Appalachian Trail. They stay at a hostel run by Pete, a Marine veteran. Logan secretly removes Emma's emergency beacon. On the first night, a solo hiker called Dirty Bird camps nearby despite Logan's attempts to drive him off. That evening, Taylor drugs Logan's whisky. As he grows impaired, Emma and Taylor lure him into a mountain pond and hold his head underwater. Emma loses her nerve and flees to shore. Taylor finishes alone.

At dawn, the body is gone. Only a shredded sleeping bag and a severed arm, identifiable by Logan's wedding ring, remain. Over the following days, rain, injury, and lost supplies drive them off the marked trail at Taylor's suggestion.

They emerge onto a cliff above a pond, and Taylor gives Emma a brownie to celebrate. Dirty Bird steps from the woods, surprised to see them. Emma recognizes a distant peak and realizes they are at the wrong pond entirely. As dizziness strikes, she understands the brownie was laced with psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound. Then Logan steps out of the forest, alive and uninjured.

The drowning was staged, and the severed arm was a prosthetic. Emma realizes she was always the intended victim: Three enter the wilderness, two walk out. Logan kicks Dirty Bird off the cliff to eliminate the witness.

Hallucinating, Emma sprints past Logan and Taylor and leaps into the pond. She survives and hides in a rock crevice, but Taylor finds her, ties her up, and drags her to Dirty Bird's camp, where Logan is waiting. The next morning, tied to a tree, Emma watches the partnership fracture. Taylor admits the original scheme was to trigger Emma's prenup by exposing Logan's infidelity, but she and Logan later tried and failed to have Emma committed to control her money. Taylor insists that killing Emma is a kindness.

Emma points out that an autopsy will reveal a boot-shaped bruise on Dirty Bird's chest, evidence of murder. Taylor and Logan turn on each other. While they argue, Emma cuts her ropes with a hidden knife, throws a can of bug spray into the campfire, and runs when it explodes.

Alone in the wilderness, Emma doubles back to steal their phones and food, leaving her pursuers with almost nothing. She salvages Dirty Bird's gear, catches fish, and discovers his real name: Philip Thomas Pigeon. She mourns him and concludes that her father was wrong. She is not the instinctive predator Gregory tried to create.

Logan abandons Taylor in the woods as their alliance collapses. Emma watches Taylor sob and whisper her name but does not reveal herself, though she throws a bag of trail mix at Taylor's feet before turning to follow Logan.

Logan returns to the campsite pond for remaining food, and Emma cuts through the woods to beat him there. He ambushes her with a gun, but a mother bear emerges from the trees. Emma tells Logan the bear's cubs are directly above his head. The bear charges. Logan panics and shoots himself in the foot. Emma dives into the pond.

Logan crawls from the water, maimed and shivering. Emma tells him about the destroying angel mushrooms, a lethal species he ate earlier, mistaking them for edible puffballs she had pointed out while he secretly watched. They cause organ failure without immediate treatment. She leaves him a Clif bar and the gun with one round. He begs her to kill him. She walks away. A mile into the woods, she hears a single gunshot.

Six days later, Pete joins a search party that finds Logan's body alongside a rubber prosthetic hand and Dirty Bird's identification. They find Dirty Bird at the cliff base. After three fruitless days searching for the two women, Pete persuades the ranger to check the Chairback Pond cabin. Inside, Taylor lies feverish and delirious. Evidence shows someone carried her there and left provisions. When asked about Emma, Taylor sobs that she left, then adds with desperate hope that Emma will come back.

Pete follows Emma's faint tracks to the tree line and deliberately drags a branch across the ground, erasing her trail. When the ranger asks about the other woman, Pete says there is no sign. In the epilogue, a woman stands on a nameless outcropping, looking out over a forest turning with autumn color. She writes a new rule: She is allowed to live. Then she walks on.