L. describes two feuding women living in hatred in the decaying house of a dead resort owner.

Sandler Gibbons meets a young woman named Junior and directs her to the Cosey residence to answer a help wanted ad.

Junior interviews with the ailing Heed and is hired on trial, concealing her background from a correctional institute.

Romen rescues a girl named Pretty-Fay from a gang rape at a party and is beaten by his friends in retaliation.

Heed plans to retrieve old menus from the abandoned hotel attic and forge a new will leaving the estate to herself.

Christine hires a young Black attorney named Gwendolyn East to contest Heed's claim on the Cosey estate.

Christine fires East after the attorney tells her the case is unlikely to succeed in Christine's favor.

Junior and Romen begin a secret sexual relationship that transforms Romen's confidence and social standing at school.

Sandler advises Romen to trust his instincts, telling him that walking away sometimes takes more courage than staying.

Christine travels to the hotel and discovers Heed and Junior in the attic in the act of forging a new will.

During the confrontation in the hotel attic, Junior moves a carpet hiding a floor hole, causing Heed to fall through.

Junior steals the car, flees the hotel, lies to Romen about the women's whereabouts, and convinces him to have sex.

Junior confesses to Romen that she left both old women at the hotel, and Romen rushes to help them.

Heed and Christine reconcile as Heed lies dying, acknowledging that Cosey and the other adults stole their childhoods.

L. confesses she poisoned Cosey after learning his real will would have left everything to his mistress, Celestial.

L. opens the novel by describing two women — Christine and Heed — living in mutual hatred inside the decaying house of a dead resort owner. The arrival of a young woman named Junior disrupts the household and sets off competing schemes: Heed plans to forge a new will, while Christine hires an attorney to contest the existing one. Junior's secret relationship with teenager Romen becomes a pawn in Heed's strategy to keep her close and compliant. The schemes collide violently at the abandoned hotel, where Junior engineers Heed's fall through the attic floor before fleeing and lying to Romen. The novel closes with Christine and Heed's deathbed reconciliation, followed by the ghostly narrator L.'s confession that she herself poisoned Cosey decades earlier to protect the family from disinheritance.

The battle over Bill Cosey's estate, from Junior's arrival to L.'s final confession.

Vida fondly recalls Bill Cosey's resort as a magical safe haven for wealthy Black guests and a generous employer.

Sandler reflects that Cosey refused to sell land to locals and used his wealth to maintain strict class hierarchies.

Junior grows up mocked and isolated in the poor Settlement, where girls are discouraged from attending school.

Junior's uncles run her over with a car after she brings a baby snake to school as a gift for her only friend.

L. observes Junior in Maceo's diner confidently rebuffing the unwanted advances of Theo, one of Romen's former friends.

Heed remembers being taken to the beach on her honeymoon and recalls first meeting Christine as a small girl.

May sends Christine away to boarding school after the fighting that erupts in the wake of Heed's wedding to Cosey.

Christine remembers living as Dr. Rio's mistress and destroying his new car in fury when he ended the relationship.

Christine returns to the Cosey family home after years away and reluctantly takes on the role of housekeeper for Heed.

Vida and Sandler realize Romen is in a romantic relationship with Junior and Vida is horrified.

Christine remembers spending nine years as activist Fruit's devoted partner, growing disillusioned when a rape victim is ignored by the group.

Heed remembers a brief affair with hotel guest Knox Sinclair and a subsequent miscarriage that devastated her.

Romen arrives at the hotel to find Heed dead and helps Christine transport Heed's body to the mortuary.

Christine speaks to Heed's ghost in the kitchen, asking what to do with Junior, and Heed suggests letting her stay.

L. ends her narration watching Celestial sing at Cosey's graveside, meditating on a love that outlasted death.

Secondary characters' memories build a fuller portrait of Bill Cosey and the world he constructed around himself. Vida recalls the resort as a paradise, while Sandler remembers Cosey's more calculating side — his exclusion of working-class locals and his exploitation of social power. Junior's traumatic upbringing in the impoverished Settlement and the violence inflicted by her own family explain her desperate search for safety and belonging. Both Christine and Heed lived fractured lives after leaving the hotel — Christine through failed romances, political disillusionment, and repeated loss, and Heed through a secret affair and a miscarriage she suffered alone. Sandler and Vida's growing alarm over Romen's relationship with Junior raises the stakes in the household as the final confrontation approaches. The pool ends with Romen carrying Heed's body to the mortuary, Christine consulting Heed's ghost about what to do with Junior, and L. sitting quietly at Cosey's grave beside Celestial.

The lives and losses surrounding the Cosey family, told through memory and aftermath.

Heed shows Junior a portrait of Bill Cosey, and Junior is immediately and inexplicably drawn to the image.

L. reveals she has been dead since she collapsed at Maceo's diner, and her presence in the narrative is ghostly.

L. reveals that Cosey's father Dark was a police informant and that Cosey's open-handed generosity was a lifelong rebellion against that legacy.

Heed reflects that she cannot read and that Cosey paid her family two hundred dollars to marry her at age 11.

A reform school administrator attempts to sexually abuse Junior during her exit interview and falls from a balcony in the encounter.

Cosey publicly spanks Heed at Christine's birthday party after Heed throws a glass in humiliation at the dinner table.

L. confronts Cosey and threatens to leave the hotel permanently if he ever physically harms Heed again.

Christine tells Junior that Heed married Christine's grandfather when Heed was only 11 and Christine was 12.

Junior fantasizes about Cosey rescuing her as a child and imagines herself in Heed's place as his chosen bride.

Romen confesses to Sandler that Junior's preference for rough sex during intercourse makes him feel uneasy.

Junior arrives at the hotel expecting to feel Cosey's presence but senses only cinnamon bread, the smell of L.

Romen tenderly caresses Junior's permanently injured foot during intimacy but is unsettled by her vacant, lifeless expression.

Heed and Christine discover they each separately witnessed Cosey's sexual misconduct as children and had each blamed herself for decades.

Heed and Christine recall their childhood code phrase and grieve the deep friendship that Cosey and May stole from them.

L. discloses her real name is Love and reflects that Heed and Christine's childhood bond was the novel's truest love.

Key revelations across the novel expose the corruption beneath the Cosey family's surface, beginning the moment Junior sees Cosey's portrait and is inexplicably drawn to it. L.'s backstory reveals how deeply the family's psychology was shaped by Cosey's father, Dark, a police informant whose cruelty drove Cosey to become his opposite. The exploitation of Heed's childhood is made explicit through the details of her marriage, and Cosey's violence toward her is met with L.'s defiant threat to leave. Junior's own cycle of abuse is marked by a harrowing encounter at reform school and a dangerous fantasy in which she imagines herself saved by a powerful older man. The emotional climax arrives when Christine and Heed finally discover they both suffered shame at Cosey's hands as children — a wound that drove four decades of mutual hatred. The novel closes with L. disclosing that her name is Love, reframing the story's central mystery as a meditation on what love truly means.