The thought 'I'm thinking of ending things' first enters the protagonist's mind and refuses to leave her.

The protagonist and Jake begin a long car drive to visit his parents at their rural childhood farm.

The protagonist recalls first meeting Jake at a university pub trivia night several weeks earlier.

The Caller begins leaving identical voicemails claiming there is only one question that needs to be resolved.

The protagonist tells Jake the story of her lonely driving instructor, Doug, who shared a philosophy of identity.

Jake and the protagonist arrive at his aging stone farmhouse after hours of driving through the dark.

Jake tells the protagonist about two pigs his father raised that were infested with maggots while still alive.

Jake's parents finally join the couple at the dinner table after making them wait.

Jake performs an unsettlingly accurate impersonation of the protagonist, leaving her shaken in front of his parents.

The protagonist explores the basement alone and finds stacked paintings depicting two indecipherable figures in the room.

Jake's mother gives the protagonist a folded portrait of Jake and warns her not to open it yet.

At a late-night Dairy Queen stop, one girl pulls the protagonist aside to whisper that she is frightened for her.

Jake spots a man waving from a high school window and storms inside the building to confront him.

The protagonist follows Jake into the school and discovers the main entrance doors have been chained shut from inside.

Jake stabs himself with a metal hanger and bleeds out in the janitor's office, dying by suicide.

Jake, a former physics student turned high school janitor, fictionalizes his memories into a story just before taking his own life. In the story, his unnamed girlfriend accompanies him on a long car drive to meet his parents, carrying a thought about ending things she cannot shake. The couple arrives at the family farm, shares an unsettling dinner with Jake's parents, and experiences increasingly strange and disorienting events. After a late-night stop at a Dairy Queen, Jake drives to a secluded high school and disappears inside after spotting a watcher in a window. The protagonist follows and finds herself trapped as the story's boundaries collapse around her. Jake's true nature is finally revealed when he dies by suicide in the high school's janitor's office.

The essential events of Jake's final night and the story he writes before his death.

The protagonist and Jake pass a burned-down farm with a brand-new swing set outside, a detail Jake dismisses.

Jake reveals he wanted his trivia team named 'Ipseity' to represent multiple individualities sharing one selfhood.

Jake tells the protagonist that whether a secret is immoral in a relationship depends entirely on its context.

Jake recalls as a child seeing Venus in the sky and being astonished no one around him seemed to care.

The driving instructor recites a Carl Jung quote to the protagonist about identity as a question only the self can answer.

Jake argues that all memory is fiction because it changes and grows more fictionalized with every recollection.

Jake admits to childhood anxiety about his limbs falling off, stemming from watching lambs lose their tails on the farm.

The protagonist and Jake discover two frozen, dead lambs propped against the side of the barn.

The protagonist notices a hen eating its own egg in the henhouse and is deeply unsettled.

Jake's parents mention at dinner that he previously brought his last girlfriend to meet them at the farm.

The protagonist overhears Jake's parents arguing through a basement vent about Jake having quit his university lab job.

The protagonist finds an envelope labeled 'Us' in Jake's desk drawer containing close-up photographs of various body parts.

Jake tells the protagonist about a mentally unstable brother he was eventually forced to cut entirely out of his life.

The country song from the beginning of the car ride begins playing on repeat over the school's loudspeakers.

The Speakers read Jake's notebooks and one suggests the writing must be read from the end to be understood.

While the main plot follows the couple's drive and dinner, the novel is layered with secondary moments that slowly reveal the story's true nature. Strange sights on the road and philosophical debates between Jake and the protagonist deepen the portrait of Jake's isolation and longing for connection. The farm tour confronts the protagonist with unsettling symbols of stagnation and circular time, while the dinner scenes expose the fractures in Jake's family history. Back in the car, revelations about Jake's troubled past add emotional weight to the protagonist's decision. The events build toward a surreal escalation inside the school, and the Speakers' final conversation about Jake's notebooks closes the story with an eerie sense of incompleteness.

The telling details and background moments that build the novel's eerie atmosphere.

The Caller leaves a voicemail claiming to know the protagonist's appearance and that she has bitten her nails since childhood.

The protagonist lies to Jake during the drive, telling him the Caller is a friend not worth answering.

Jake tells the protagonist their relationship has its own valence, meaning it actively draws outside influences toward them.

The protagonist wonders whether she is fundamentally incapable of passion rather than simply uncertain about Jake himself.

Jake gives the protagonist a pair of blue slippers that fit her perfectly despite his being much taller.

The protagonist recognizes the child in a farmhouse photo as herself even though Jake insists it is him.

The protagonist returns from the bathroom to find her slippers have been turned to face the opposite direction.

The protagonist realizes she has been biting her nails throughout dinner and tries to hide her bloody nailbeds.

Jake's father confuses the protagonist with Jake's ex-girlfriend Steph and tells them they are a naturally good match.

The protagonist finds a photo of a young girl in Jake's bedroom with an unidentified man watching from the background.

The protagonist reaches a clear decision to end things with Jake while sitting alone in the car outside the school.

Jake calls the protagonist 'Steph' while kissing her in the car outside the darkened school building.

The protagonist finds a child's shirt in the school's janitor's office that she recognizes as her own.

The narrative voice shifts from 'I' to 'we' as the protagonist's identity begins merging fully into Jake's.

Jake reveals his parents died long ago and the troubled brother he described throughout the story is actually himself.

Beneath the surface narrative, a series of discoveries and decisions gradually expose the truth of Jake's fractured mental state and the protagonist's uncertain identity. Disturbing details — the Caller's uncanny knowledge, slippers that fit impossibly well, and photographs that blur two people into one — hint at the protagonist's true nature as a figment of Jake's imagination. The dinner at the farm is full of small but telling moments of disorientation, from bleeding nailbeds to a father who cannot tell the women in his son's life apart. Once at the school, the protagonist's sense of self unravels entirely as she reaches her final decision, and the narrative voice shifts from 'I' to 'we.' The novel ends with Jake's ultimate revelation: that the story was a failed experiment in imagined connection, and the decision he has reached through writing it seals his fate.

The key discoveries and decisions that expose the story's true psychological depth.