The Anniversary

Set in Monarch, Nebraska, and spanning 1992 to 2011, the story follows two intertwined lives across a decade of trauma, loss, and resilience. Each section takes place on May 1st, a date of devastating significance. The prologue shows an unnamed figure at Megan Tucker's grave, examining her driver's license and reflecting on the murder as their first kill.

In 1992, Jules Delaney and Quinn Riley are eleventh-graders at Monarch High School. Jules is popular; Quinn is a quiet, book-loving outsider whose mother Nadine works at a potato chip factory. Quinn's father died in a car accident when Quinn was twelve, leaving Nadine to raise Quinn and his nonverbal younger brother George.

On May 1st, Quinn comes home to a surprise seventeenth birthday party, notices bruises on George's arm, and confronts Randy Calhoon, Nadine's boyfriend, accusing him of abuse. He storms out, and his Uncle Pat, Nadine's brother and a long-haul trucker, drives him to a grunge concert in Omaha as a birthday surprise. At the concert, Jules catches her boyfriend Brad Paxton groping her friend Miranda and leaves alone. She takes a bus back to Monarch, retrieves her car, and is attacked by someone hiding in the back seat: an unknown man who rapes her, steals her driver's license, and threatens to kill her family if she tells anyone. Meanwhile, Quinn spots Brad being menaced by rivals outside the venue, punches the ringleader, whose skull cracks against the pavement, and is arrested.

Five months into Quinn's incarceration, Nadine is bludgeoned to death with a hammer; Randy is suspected but cleared. Quinn is released on his eighteenth birthday and enlists in the Army. He visits George at a group home, where a caregiver named Holly promises to read his letters to George. At a therapy session, Quinn encounters Jules, there for a court-ordered program. She drives him to a carnival and reveals she traded her old car because it triggered anxiety from her assault, which she has told no one about.

Quinn visits Ms. Glomm, Nadine's coworker, who reveals Nadine planned to report irregularities at the factory and kept evidence in a "Red Flag file," a green folder hidden in a spot called "the cubby." At his foreclosed home, Quinn searches the cubby and finds a hammer matted with hair and blood. Jules, learning the May Day Killer has taken another victim, mails an anonymous letter describing her attacker to the lead detective.

By 1994, Quinn is deployed to Somalia, where his friend Giuseppe, an Italian soldier, is killed after a Belgian soldier abandons them in hostile territory. He delivers Giuseppe's last letter to his family in Recanati, Italy. Jules has become a fashion model in Milan after being discovered at a University of Nebraska-Lincoln football game. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent contacts her, revealing the Bureau traced her letter and needs her help as a May Day survivor.

In 1995, Quinn testifies at Randy Calhoon's murder trial. The jury convicts Randy based on DNA from the hammer, but Quinn learns evidence favorable to the defense was withheld. Holly, now Quinn's girlfriend, remembers seeing a green folder among George's belongings. They find the Red Flag file with cryptic notes in Nadine's handwriting: "Pearl," "Megan," "D-302," and delivery schedules. That same day, Jules meets FBI Special Agent Jack Smith and fellow survivors Lucy and Carrie. Jack reveals one survivor is missing. Jules learns her sister Clare has disappeared.

Over the following years, Quinn works as a private investigator while pursuing his mother's case. He investigates the disappearance of Minnie Agbayani, a four-year-old who vanished from outside her father's flower shop. He confronts Kenny Pearl, Nadine's former supervisor, who reveals that "Pearl" in the file refers to Megan Tucker, a girl murdered in 1972 in Ashwell, his parents' hometown. Quinn discovers his father was once arrested in connection with Tucker's case.

Jules returns to Nebraska as FBI bait for the May Day Killer. She confronts Mr. Vanderman, her former guidance counselor, after finding Clare's yearbook defaced with accusations against him, but she accepts his explanations. Quinn visits retired Sheriff Colton Rupert, who reveals that a second suspect in the Tucker case, a foster child named John Smith, had a history of voyeurism. Rupert found a chair in the closet at the murder scene, suggesting two perpetrators: one who attacked and one who watched.

By 1998, Jules has founded Find Them, a nonprofit supporting survivors and documenting missing persons. Quinn traces the Agbayani case to a remote Iowa farm and discovers Minnie alive. Jules helps reunite the family and learns Quinn cracked the case. He drives her home, and they part as friends.

In 1999, Jules hosts a Find Them gala where Quinn receives the Heroism Award. Uncle Pat arrives late, charming Quinn's colleagues. At the after-party, Jules recognizes the May Day Killer by his coin-flip ritual and laugh. He kidnaps her at gunpoint. At the Find Them office, Quinn realizes the abduction sites match delivery routes in the Red Flag file, all driven by Uncle Pat. The note "D-302" refers to a bunker at the Sioux Ordnance Depot, a field of World War II ammunition bunkers near Ashwell.

Jules wakes in Pat's trunk. When he marches her across the field, she sprays him with concealed pepper spray and runs. Inside the bunker, she finds another captive in a gasoline-soaked cell. Pat catches Jules and prepares to burn them alive, but she snatches his retractable key. Quinn arrives, and Pat holds him at gunpoint, claiming Quinn's father participated in Tucker's murder. They fight. Jules and the captive escape, strangle Pat with the retractable cord, and Quinn rams him into the cell. Jules locks the door, picks up Pat's coin, asks "Heads or tails?" through the slot, and lights the gasoline. The survivors stagger out as sirens approach.

Quinn spends the next year traveling before settling in Recanati as a bartender. Jules gives a televised interview on ABC's 20/20, publicly identifying herself as a survivor and addressing Quinn: "If you ever see this, Quinn Riley, please, come home." She appears at his bar in Italy, and they reunite.

Now a couple, they visit Tucker's grave, where a groundskeeper mentions a man who also visited a second headstone. They find the grave of Tanya Smith, "mother of John," who died May 1, 1967. Tanya's sister, Beth Buckley, reveals that twelve-year-old John witnessed his mother's killer flip a coin before strangling her, the origin of the ritual. A childhood photo of John provokes Jules's recognition, and a photo of Tanya reveals she resembles the survivors, explaining the killer's "type."

Jules, Lucy, and Carrie confront Jack Smith, whose real name is John Smith. Lucy holds a gun under the table. Jack confesses, claiming he spared the survivors who resembled his mother because he "liked the way you scream." Undercover police arrest him on a wire-recorded confession.

Ten years later, Jules and Quinn are married with two children: six-year-old George Giuseppe Riley and four-year-old Clare. At a bookstore signing for Quinn's novel The Hill of Infinity, friends fill the audience, including the exonerated Randy Calhoon. When asked if the female lead is based on a real person, Quinn looks at Jules and feels complete and at home in the world.