Magpie

The novel opens with Marisa, a young illustrator who runs a small business called Telling Tales, touring a house on Richborne Terrace in London. She is drawn to its quiet, which contrasts with her turbulent childhood: Her mother abandoned the family when Marisa was seven, taking her baby sister Anna and leaving Marisa with an emotionally withdrawn father. Marisa texts her boyfriend Jake, who works for a city consultancy firm, to say she loves the house. They have been dating for just over three months, and his suggestion that they move in together comes at a welcome time, as her business has slowed and finances are tight. Her closest friend, Jas, warns Marisa she is moving too fast, but Marisa feels certain Jake is different. He is steady and undemonstrative, and on their first date he brought up wanting children.

Marisa moves in and sets up her studio, and the couple begins trying for a baby. Jake's mother Annabelle, a tall and imperious woman, pays an uninvited visit and is coolly critical of the decor and of the couple living together unmarried. When Marisa tells Jake, he apologizes and assures her their future together is all that matters. Looking back, Marisa identifies this as the last moment of bliss before everything changes.

When a major work deal of Jake's collapses, they take in a lodger. Marisa reluctantly agrees, aware that Jake pays most of the rent. Kate, a 36-year-old film publicist, moves in and quickly unsettles Marisa by treating shared spaces as her own. Kate possesses an assurance Marisa envies and resents. Marisa attends a prenatal yoga class, lying about being six weeks pregnant, and discovers Kate at the back of the room, having followed her without saying anything. A flashback reveals that at seventeen, Marisa ran away from boarding school to search for her mother and was raped by a bartender. She has never told anyone.

When Marisa discovers she is genuinely pregnant, she and Jake celebrate. But the early weeks bring exhaustion and nausea, and Kate begins inserting herself further into the household, cooking Jake's favorite meals and joining conversations. When Marisa raises concerns, Jake defends Kate and calls Marisa's behavior "erratic," citing incidents Marisa denies. At the 12-week scan, Marisa feels nothing while Jake weeps. She begins having violent intrusive thoughts. One evening she sees what she interprets as Jake and Kate pulling apart on the sofa. She suppresses her suspicion but silently resolves to destroy Kate. She begins following Kate to work in disguise and keeping an obsessive diary. After three weeks, Kate catches her at Oxford Circus station and demands she stop.

At home, Marisa discovers Jake's laptop synced to his text messages and reads hundreds of affectionate exchanges between Jake and Kate, including plans to become "a proper family." She concludes she has been set up. She screams, smashes a bowl, and scratches her wrist until it bleeds. She has no money, no flat, and no friends to turn to.

The novel's second half shifts to Kate's perspective, overturning everything. Kate returns to a dark house and is attacked, knocked unconscious. She wakes with her legs bound and finds Marisa holding a knife, demanding to know how long Kate and Jake have been sleeping together. Kate replies six years. The entire first half has been Marisa's delusional rewriting of reality: Kate is Jake's long-term partner, and Marisa is their surrogate, carrying a baby conceived with Marisa's eggs and Jake's sperm. There is no affair, and there is no lodger.

Kate's backstory reveals the truth. She met Jake at her 30th birthday party and moved into his Battersea flat. After years of unexplained infertility and six rounds of failed IVF, including a missed miscarriage in which a gestational sac developed with no embryo, their consultant suggested surrogacy. Through a surrogacy organization, they met Marisa at a social event. Marisa told them her mother had experienced miscarriages and that she wanted to help another couple. The agency coordinator urged caution, noting Marisa was young, had never given birth, and was single, but Kate and Jake felt an immediate connection and agreed to proceed.

Kate invited Marisa to live with them after visiting her cramped bedsit. Warning signs appeared almost immediately: Marisa used the master bathroom instead of her own, cooked Jake's favorite meals, and directed all conversation at him as though Kate were invisible. Kate stayed silent, terrified of jeopardizing the pregnancy. The embryo transfer succeeded, but Marisa's behavior grew erratic. She withdrew to her room, stopped answering the phone, and wrote obsessively in a notebook.

In the present, Kate calms Marisa into putting down the knife, then decides against calling the police. She fears official involvement could endanger the pregnancy or allow Marisa to keep the baby, since their surrogacy agreement is not legally binding until after birth. She calls Chris, Jake's retired GP father, who arrives with Annabelle and administers lorazepam, a sedative. Kate searches Marisa's room and discovers obsessive scrawling, secretly taken photographs of Jake, a diary that retells their shared history from Marisa's distorted perspective, and an unfilled prescription for risperidone, an antipsychotic, dated six months earlier. Marisa had stopped taking the medication to protect the pregnancy.

Jake's parents take Marisa to the family cottage in Gloucestershire, where Chris monitors her medication and Jake pretends to be her partner to keep her stable. Kate meets Jas, who reveals Marisa's true history: her mother did abandon her, she was raped at seventeen, and they met at a support group for survivors of sexual assault. When Marisa stops her medication, she develops obsessive fixations on men. Everything she told Kate and Jake about her happy family was invented.

On risperidone, Marisa becomes calm and cooperative. But Annabelle begins manipulating the situation, telling Jake that Marisa feels too guilty to see Kate while telling Marisa that Kate does not want to see her. Jake starts visiting the cottage alone, and an unacknowledged distance grows between him and Kate.

Annabelle organizes a baby shower at the family home. During the party, she corners Kate in the kitchen and tells her that Jake and Marisa are better suited, that the baby is not genetically Kate's, and that she deliberately kept Kate away. Kate despairs but then feels a surge of determination. She returns to the living room and demands Annabelle repeat her words. Annabelle denies everything, but Marisa steps forward from the corridor and confirms it all. Marisa states firmly that the baby is Kate's, has always been, and always will be. Jake erupts at his mother, accusing her of being a narcissist who treats her children like chess pieces.

Kate, Jake, and Marisa leave together. Marisa moves in with Jas for the remainder of the pregnancy, and standing up to Annabelle proves a turning point in her recovery. Leo Christopher Sturridge is born with 1990s hip-hop playing in the delivery room. When Kate holds her son, she recognizes him as hers. In the months that follow, Kate and Jake settle into parenthood. Marisa goes traveling through the Americas. Annabelle sends knitted bootees addressed only to Jake, who throws the card away. Walking along the river near Battersea Park, Kate reflects that she can understand, if not forgive, a mother's possessive love, because she now knows she would do anything for Leo.