Monogamy

Annie, a photographer in her mid-thirties living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, meets Graham at the opening party for his bookstore. She has been single for seven years after a first marriage she regards with shame. Graham is a large, bearded, ebullient man, and they share an immediate connection. Annie initially resists the relationship but yields to Graham's persistent love, moving in within five months. They marry on the anniversary of the store's opening.

One morning during the summer of 2008, the novel shifts to Graham's perspective. He sits alone before dawn, consumed by guilt. He and his first wife, Frieda, a plain, earnest woman, had a nominally open marriage, but while Graham thrived in that arrangement, Frieda suffered silently until she left, taking their young son Lucas. During his marriage to Annie, Graham had a brief affair with a married friend named Linda Parkman, which he confessed to Frieda; she raged at him for not having learned from their own pain. Now he harbors a more pressing secret: he has been sleeping with Rosemary Gregory, a recently divorced acquaintance who has begun treating their encounters as a real relationship.

Annie's professional history emerges as she prepares for an upcoming photography show. A series documenting her mother's Alzheimer's disease caused a rift with her oldest sister Audrey, who called Annie "cold," echoing Annie's own fear about her emotional reserve. She slowed her career for years while raising her daughter Sarah and eventually developed a new direction focused on absence and memory, photographing empty rooms and worn interiors that suggest human presence without depicting it.

Graham confides in his oldest friend, John Norris, about the affair. John advises him to tell Rosemary that Annie is his last love. That afternoon, Graham walks to Rosemary's house and ends things, insisting his marriage is at risk. Walking home, his remorse gives way to joy. That evening, Annie tells him he is a good husband, and he responds that it means everything to hear her say that.

The next morning, the novel delivers its central blow. Annie wakes to find Graham dead beside her. She sits with his body, existing on two levels: one trying to disengage from reality, the other trying to absorb it. She calls Sarah, Frieda, and the bookstore, canceling the dinner party Graham had planned. That evening, John arrives with flowers, not having received word of the cancellation. For a few suspended seconds, Annie believes Graham has come home. John tells her that at lunch the day before, Graham said Annie was his first and last love.

The narrative reveals how each family member absorbs the loss. Sarah describes her father to Thomas, a man she has been seeing briefly, as someone whose terrible childhood made him grateful for everything. Frieda is devastated. She and Annie share a complicated friendship, forged through their mothers' Alzheimer's and an arrangement in which each helped parent the other's child. Lucas, Graham and Frieda's son and an editor in New York, recognizes that his mother's core sadness will take precedence over his own grief.

Annie retreats to a lakeside cottage in Vermont she and Graham owned. A chance encounter with the name of a childhood friend triggers buried memories, and one night a forgotten trauma surfaces: a man in a Chicago park who exposed himself to Annie and her friend when they were girls. The recovery of this lost event alarms her; if she could forget something so significant, she might also lose Graham. She clings to Memoir with Bookshop, a collaborative book she and Graham made, as an anchor against forgetting.

The family scatters Graham's ashes at the Vermont cottage. Frieda is excluded, primarily at Lucas's wish, creating tension. Two memorial events follow in September. At the bookstore, Frieda gives a graceful toast praising Graham's kindness. At the private house party that evening, Annie finds Rosemary hunched over Graham's desk, her face ravaged by grief and guilt. In that instant, Annie understands: Graham and Rosemary were lovers.

Annie confronts Frieda, who admits she knew about Graham's infidelity. Annie feels doubly betrayed. Frieda, however, is thinking of the earlier affair with Linda Parkman, not Rosemary, and cannot correct the misunderstanding without exposing that older secret. Annie's grief transforms into rage. She drives to Vermont but finds no comfort, her mind looping through images of Graham with Rosemary. Back in Cambridge, she tears page after page from Memoir with Bookshop.

In the years that follow, Frieda arrives at a crucial realization: Graham held her too close for too long, keeping her as his confidante in ways unfair to both women. Lucas struggles to bond with his newborn daughter Claire but connects with her after dreaming of Graham dancing with each family member.

Over two years after Graham's death, Annie hosts a Thanksgiving dinner. She has begun photographing people again, starting with pictures of Claire. Lucas mentions that his author Ian Pedersen has a novel coming out, and Annie's face changes; she knew Ian at the MacDowell Colony, an artists' retreat. The novel reveals that during a residency there, furious at Graham for refusing to move to New York, Annie and Ian shared a charged but unconsummated encounter. After the dinner, Sarah finds Memoir with Bookshop with a third of its pages ripped out, evidence of a rage beyond ordinary grief.

Months later, Annie attends Ian's reading at the bookstore. Over drinks, he says he remembers nights in her studio. Annie corrects him quietly: There was only one encounter, and it was an afternoon. Walking home, she recognizes that memorability is something others bestow. She notices that the reading chairs Graham loved have been removed from the store, and the detail triggers a memory of the night their relationship began. On the icy sidewalk, she falls and breaks her arm.

After surgery, Annie wakes momentarily believing Graham is alive. Frieda drives her home, and Annie tries to explain: She loved him again in that moment. She remembered loving him. That night, memories return without bitterness. She recalls their final evening, when Graham whispered that he was a needy man who required so much from life. Annie now understands that his infidelity and her near-affair with Ian were connected: He needed too much because of who he was, and she couldn't give enough because of who she was. He understood this; she hadn't.

At dawn, Annie watches snow cover the backyard. The world looks like an old photograph, full of the mystery of everything present but made invisible. She thinks of getting her camera, then remembers her broken arm. She will have to remember all of this on her own. She feels the grief returning and welcomes it.