Kill Your Darlings

The novel unfolds in reverse chronological order, beginning in 2023 and moving backward through four decades to 1982, gradually revealing the crimes and secrets that bind married couple Wendy and Thom Graves.

The story opens in 2023 on Goose Neck, a peninsula in New Essex, Massachusetts. Wendy hosts a dinner party for colleagues from the English department at New Essex State University, where Thom is a professor. Among the guests is Emily Majorino, the department's new administrative assistant, who surprises Wendy by praising her only published poetry collection, Specifics Omitted. A very drunk Thom mentions he is writing a mystery novel. After the guests leave, an alarmed Wendy opens his laptop and discovers a work in progress titled Come End of Summer, with an epigraph from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The opening describes a fictional reunion Wendy recognizes as their own secret history, a past they agreed never to share. She realizes Thom is writing a thinly veiled confession. That night, finding him drunk at the top of the stairs, she pushes him. He tumbles to the bottom but survives, remembering nothing. In the days that follow, she decides life would be better without him.

Wendy books a trip to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., where they shared their first kiss as teenagers. Before they leave, she reads 40 pages of his novel and finds it even worse than expected. In Georgetown, Thom tells Wendy he has decided to abandon the novel. That night, they walk to the Exorcist Steps, a steep staircase featured in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Thom stands at the top, swaying from alcohol. A fragmented memory from his earlier fall surfaces, and he tells Wendy, "Go ahead, I'm ready." She places a hand on his chest and pushes. He dies from a broken neck at the bottom of the steps. Wendy calls 911, reporting that her drunk husband fell.

The narrative shifts to 2018, the year of Thom and Wendy's shared fiftieth birthday. Their marriage is governed by a pact never to speak about their criminal past, Wendy's first marriage, or their reunion at a writers' conference in 1991. Thom increasingly breaks these rules when drunk. That year, he begins formulating the idea for a novel based on their crimes. Late one night after their birthday party, Wendy tells him, "You're not the only murderer in this family. You're just the only one who can't move past it." Thom lies awake replaying her words, having always believed the blood is on his hands alone.

In November 2013, Detective Michael Elo visits the Graves home to ask about the drowning of Alexander Deighton, the chair of Thom's English department. Wendy provides an alibi for Thom. After the detective leaves, she discovers that their 13-year-old son, Jason, has been searching his parents' computers and found, on Thom's laptop, the name "Alexandra Fritsch," linked to an article about an unsolved stabbing in Lubbock, Texas, in 1992. Through extended flashback, the novel reveals that Wendy deliberately drowned Deighton at a local quarry. Her motivations are layered: Deighton holds compromising knowledge about her; his death would open the department chair position for Thom; and killing him would give her the firsthand experience of taking a life, equalizing her bond with Thom.

The 2012 section reveals the threat that helped trigger this decision. A private investigator named Stan Benally, hired by Sloane Barrington, the sister of Wendy's first husband, Bryce Barrington, befriends Thom at a local bar while posing as a retired police officer. Benally knows Thom was in Austin, Texas, on the weekend Bryce drowned and that Thom lied about ever visiting the state. He also mentions Alexandra Fritsch, a student stabbed to death the same night, suggesting she may have been a witness. Wendy pays Benally off with a gold bar, persuading him to report he found nothing. As she exits the motel, Deighton spots her and makes a remark about blackmail, cementing her decision to kill him. When Wendy later mentions Fritsch to Thom, his face drains of color, and she suspects for the first time that he has concealed something about Texas.

Earlier sections trace Thom's worsening drinking, serial infidelities, and emotional fragility. In 2005, he discovers the name Alexandra Fritsch in an archived article, finally identifying the woman he killed. In 2003, Wendy wins a poetry prize for Specifics Omitted. The judge's citation notes that "by not naming the dark, darkness imbues every word," an observation that alarms Wendy. She resolves to write no more poetry.

In 1995, Thom and Wendy elope to Las Vegas, now multimillionaires from Wendy's inheritance. In 1993, they stage a public reunion at a book festival, pretending to meet for the first time since middle school. Thom gives Wendy a sanitized account of Texas: He pushed Bryce into the pool, and Bryce drowned. He omits that a woman came to the house afterward and that he followed and killed her.

The novel's central crime unfolds across chapters set in 1992, presented in reverse. At Bryce's funeral on August 28, his sister Sloane accuses Wendy of murder. On the night of August 22, the novel reveals the secret Thom has kept from Wendy. After drowning Bryce by shoving him into his pool and holding his head under, Thom encounters a stranger who arrives looking for Bryce and notices Thom's wet hand. Panicking, Thom follows her into Lubbock and stabs her with a hunting knife. She is later identified as Alexandra Fritsch, a 19-year-old student whose murder is never solved. Thom resolves that Wendy will know about the drowning but never about the stabbing. Earlier that summer, Thom and Wendy finalized the plan at a literary festival in the Berkshires. Wendy insisted on two rules: No evidence can exist, and nothing out of the ordinary can happen before the crime. Most critically, no one should know they are connected.

In 1991, Thom and Wendy reunite at a writers' conference in Ohio after eight years apart. Wendy engineers the meeting after a college friend mentions Thom's name on the attendee list. Over the weekend, she tells Thom about her unhappy marriage to Bryce, a wealthy and unfaithful man. A prenup would leave her nothing in a divorce, but if Bryce dies, she inherits his $10 million trust fund. They begin discussing murder, with Wendy framing it partly as a way to protect her mother financially and Thom framing it as destiny.

The novel's earliest sections, set in 1984, reveal formative events. Fifteen-year-old Wendy returns to Colorado from her aunt's home in Mendocino, California, where she secretly gives birth to a baby conceived with Thom and given up for adoption. Before the handoff, Wendy suggests the name Annabel, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, a detail that resonates with the 2023 revelation that Emily Majorino's legal first name is Annabel. Back in Colorado, Wendy's father, Frank, who has an alcohol addiction, is found drowned in the bathtub. Wendy overhears her mother, Rose, speaking to the body: "I'm sorry, darling. I had no choice." Wendy never confronts Rose, understanding she acted to protect the family. After the funeral, Rose tells Wendy, "The happiest people are the ones who are able to forget the past." Wendy takes this as a guiding philosophy.

The novel concludes with its earliest chapter, set in 1982. On an eighth-grade school trip to Washington, D.C., 14-year-old Wendy sits alone on the bus until Thom takes the only open seat beside her. They bond over horror stories. On the final night, they share an awkward first kiss at the top of the Exorcist Steps, the same spot where, 41 years later, Wendy will push Thom to his death.