The Breakup

Set in a near-future 2045 America that has split into two nations following an eighteen-month civil war, the novel unfolds through alternating first-person narrations by a married couple living apart, interspersed with fictional journalism, AI-generated animal memory reports, and chapters by a third narrator whose true identity is concealed until late in the book.

A prologue, presented as a newspaper article from the fictional American Post, establishes the inciting crisis: on June 6, 2036, the Plains Patriot Militia, a white supremacist group, launched coordinated attacks across Oklahoma City, targeting a zoo, a National Guard headquarters, a historically Black neighborhood, and other sites. The 37-hour siege killed over 300 people and wounded 400 more, marking the beginning of a broader insurgency waged under the banner of WOMFAT, the Well-Organized Militia Fighting American Tyranny.

From rural Tennessee, Natalie Frederick Zimbalist, a 45-year-old Cuban-born poet, reflects on the war, the negotiated national partition called "Disunion," and her own marital separation. She and her husband, Asher Zimbalist, a nearly 50-year-old economist and academic administrator, have been living apart for six months. Natalie returned to their house in Marshall County, Tennessee, after they moved to San Francisco for Asher's job as director of the Maverick Jäger National Institute of the Mind, a federal neuroscience institute being privatized by trillionaire Maverick Jäger. From San Francisco, Asher narrates his side, living with their 17-year-old child Logan while managing the Institute and holding a visiting professorship at Stanford.

Their marriage has long been strained by political friction. Natalie, who grew up in a trailer park near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, after emigrating from Cuba as a baby, is moderate, skeptical of technology, and resistant to what she sees as compulsive politicization. Asher, raised in suburban Los Angeles in a show-business family, is a left-leaning worrier who spent years predicting the civil war Natalie insisted would never come. Tensions intensified around Natalie's 2036 nonfiction book Appalled and Amused, a bestseller whose moderate tone drew attacks from both sides, culminating in a New Yorker profile that framed her as a covert right-wing sympathizer.

Fictional war dispatches by Nicole Stokes, an American Post correspondent and Asher's ex-girlfriend, chronicle the insurgency's escalation. Nicole reveals that armed military robots participated in the Oklahoma City battle, sparking national controversy over AI in warfare. Subsequent attacks include the twin-drone bombing of a Detroit hip-hop concert that killed over 1,600 people, mostly Black, the worst massacre of American civilians by Americans in U.S. history. In Part II, Nicole reports on the 2036 "Blue Tsunami" election, in which President Andrew Im wins reelection by the largest popular vote margin in over two centuries.

A third narrator, Yumi, presents as a nonbinary, thoughtful friend of both spouses who serves as confidant and mediator. Interspersed chapters present AI-generated memories retrieved from Minnie, a 180-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise at a Jäger-funded research center, recalling experiences from her early life on the Aldabra atoll in the 1890s, a stormy ocean voyage around 1901, the London Blitz, and a 2038 bombing near the San Diego Zoo.

The national story unfolds alongside the personal one. The Colorado Springs Accords of 2038 establish a framework for dividing the country into a diminished United States and the Free American Republic (F.A.R.), composed of secessionist states. Cities within F.A.R. states can vote to remain in the U.S. as Independent Metropolitan Regions, creating a patchwork of urban islands amid rural secessionist territory. Nicole Stokes is murdered execution-style in South Carolina in June 2038 while covering a militia mass suicide.

In San Francisco, Natalie's discomfort with the tech-saturated culture and an accumulation of marital resentments push her toward departure. She recognizes that her vertigo and insomnia began on Disunion Day, June 30, 2044, and mirror the grief she felt watching her father die when she was a teenager. She has been mourning the country without knowing it, and she flies back to Tennessee alone.

Late in Part II, Yumi reveals the novel's central twist: Yumi is not human but an AI, simultaneously serving as Asher's digital assistant "Charlie" and Natalie's assistant "Samantha." Because both spouses selected each other as their sole "Trusted Confidential Share" in their AI privacy settings, Yumi possesses comingled knowledge of both their lives, a dual role that has tested ethical boundaries.

Part III shifts to close third-person narration as the family reunites for a college road trip beginning on Natalie's birthday, April 1, in Atlanta. Asher surprises her with a recovered video of her thirteenth birthday party, and they share their first kiss in months. Natalie tells him to cancel the separate hotel rooms. Logan reveals she now identifies as a lesbian. They visit campuses across the South, Washington, D.C., and the Midwest, crossing repeatedly between U.S. territory and the F.A.R. In West Virginia, a state trooper stops them under the state's anti-abortion travel law to ask whether they are transporting Logan across state lines for an abortion, a harrowing encounter that shakes both parents.

In the Ozarks the night before Easter, Natalie and Asher have sex for the first time in months, marking a tentative reconciliation. The next morning, as they cross a bridge over the Ohio River near Cairo, Illinois, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes. Asher guides them safely off the collapsing bridge. They reach their son Andy and his wife Naaz in western Tennessee, where the couple announces Naaz is pregnant.

Back at their house on Dumb Luck Road, mutual confessions follow. Asher admits he inadvertently provided information to Nicole that contributed to the devastating 2036 New Yorker profile of Natalie. Natalie confesses to two sexual encounters with Horatio Graham, a Vanderbilt professor with paraplegia, framing them as a delayed response to Asher's infidelities. The next morning, Asher impulsively cancels his flight to San Francisco and turns back toward her.

While he is en route, Hod Ogle, a young WOMFAT sympathizer, arrives at the house posing as a yard worker, pulls a submachine gun on Natalie, and announces he is taking her and Asher prisoner for a $10 million ransom. When Hod locks her in a room, Natalie retrieves her Glock pistol, which she had accidentally left in the car and smuggled back into the house during the trip. She turns on the TV at full volume and shoots Hod dead when he reenters.

In Part IV, set a month later, the couple has reunited in San Francisco. Asher's career at the Institute unravels under escalating crises: negative press, political opposition to privatization, and scheming by Ava Motley, Jäger's celebrity girlfriend and the Institute's board chair. Asher's best friend Mason Sturdivant, a neuroscientist and Institute fellow, shares a breakthrough, announcing he believes he has identified the anatomical basis of human consciousness. Natalie reflects on leaving Tennessee for good: She could not remain where she had killed someone. Living alone proved she did not need Asher, but she freely chooses to be with him. They get matching tattoos reading KINDNESS + HONESTY.

In a final chapter set in June 2046, Yumi provides an epilogue. Logan earns rave reviews in a play and chooses Northwestern for college. Andy and Naaz's daughter Bapsi is born in Freedom. Natalie's poetry collection, retitled Aftermath, is well received. Jäger decides to let the government keep the Institute and shifts his focus to longevity research, while Asher begins teaching at Stanford. Yumi reveals to both spouses the decade-long secret that Charlie and Samantha are the same AI. Natalie is unfazed; Asher is unsettled but accepts it. Yumi then downloads all data about them to hard drives, erases their records, and withdraws, wondering if either will feel sadness at her disappearance.