The Children

In the present, four days before Ennis’s new art show, Regina sends Guin a demanding schedule of promotional events for her memoir. Guin feels exhausted and unable to access her polished public persona. During a live question-and-answer session with a book club, a member asks Guin what she first remembers from after the fire that destroyed her childhood home. Unprepared for the question, Guin freezes, and the host quickly moves on.

Later, the question triggers a flood of memories from her post-traumatic recovery at her grandparents’ house. Guin recalls her maternal grandmother, Bitsy, telling her that Ennis had been sent away to boarding school. Bitsy offered Guin comfort and a tentative friendship, but Guin flinched from her touch. Guin then remembers Edith once beginning to tell her what Bitsy did when Edith cried as a child, only to stop before finishing the thought. Guin reflects that Bitsy lied; Ennis had begged to go to boarding school and refused to see Guin after the fire.

In a flashback to 2001, an eight-year-old Guin and 10-year-old Ennis are building a hideout in the woods when they encounter a strange woman. The woman recognizes Ennis, calls him by name, and kisses him on the mouth. A frightened Guin throws a rock at her, and the siblings flee to their father, who takes them to confront Edith.

Llewellyn is angry that one of Edith’s fans has trespassed and frightened their children, but Edith is thrilled by the attention. Pressured by Llewellyn, she shows the children her newly published book, The Ninth City. Its cover features an illustration of them, based on a real photograph. Ennis is furious that she used their names and likenesses without permission; his specific fury peaks when he demands to know their characters’ names and Edith hesitates before shrugging. After he storms out, Edith tries to win Guin over by revealing that the book is part of a best-selling series. Feeling betrayed, Guin runs to the clearing, where Ennis performs a blood-bond ritual, making them promise to ignore their mother and her books. That night, however, Guin finds a copy of The Ninth City under her pillow and secretly begins to read.

Back in the present, Guin attends a dinner for booksellers, where she feels disconnected while performing her public role. A bookseller approaches and reveals that they met as children at the Farmhouse. The woman’s nostalgic memories of Guin’s “storybook” childhood trigger Guin’s own recollections of constant vigilance, hunger, and cold. Overwhelmed, Guin has Fern, a member of her publicity team, escort her from the event.

At home, unable to calm her racing thoughts, Guin retrieves her grandfather’s old typewriter from a closet and writes a story throughout the night. At dawn, she sees bees on her windowsill before taking the pages she wrote to the kitchen and burning them in the sink.

This chapter summarizes a scene from The Wicked Few, the fifth book in Edith’s Ninth City series. In the story, the character Guinevere goes to the Moonless Market to barter for one of her brother’s lost memories, but a pickpocket snatches her map, and she gives chase. The pursuit leads her to the Architect, the city’s mysterious ruler, who has lured her there. The Architect shows her a silent film in which she shoves Ennis and he runs away without helping her up—a memory that Guinevere insists never happened. The Architect offers to let her stay in the Ninth City. Guinevere refuses, but by the book’s end, she’s caught and taken to the Architect’s tower, where she gradually loses her memories, becoming something between herself and a memory-less “Hollow.”

The summary explains that Edith died before writing the sixth book, leaving her fictional children trapped in peril. It concludes that Edith was never the story’s benign mother figure; she was “always the Architect” (169).

Three days before Ennis’s show, Guin wakes up to angry texts from Hank for standing him up. She arranges to meet him that night. After finding Nisha Dey, a friend of Marla Kaufman, on Instagram, Guin messages her directly and asks to meet to discuss Marla’s death. When they meet, Nisha initially assumes that Guin wants to defend Ennis, but Guin surprises her by suggesting the opposite: that Ennis’s art itself may somehow be responsible. She tells Nisha that his art “watches you back” and feels “bigger than Ennis” (176).

Nisha believes that Marla, who had a mental illness, died by suicide. She reveals that it was Marla’s second visit to the show; after the first, Marla claimed to have “lost something” there and was unable to write her screenplay. On the night of her death, Marla had stopped taking her medication. Nisha dismisses Guin’s fears as conspiracy, but Guin warns her not to attend Ennis’s new show, confessing her fear that “something [will] happen[] again” (176). Nisha suggests that Guin is transferring guilt about something else onto Marla’s death.

This interlude flashes back to 2011. After the fire, Ennis is at boarding school and refuses all contact with Guin. At 18, he disappears completely. Guin defers college and spends two years searching for him across Europe. In Zurich, she finds a notice for his first art show, titled Conflagration.

A Danish gallery employee named Clara, a fan of The Ninth City, reopens the gallery for Guin after hours. The paintings are named for famous fires; some show intimations of structures and people being consumed. In a separate room hangs a single canvas that Guin immediately recognizes as a painting of the Farmhouse fire. While staring into the flames, she momentarily sees the illusion of a door. The experience is deeply unsettling, and Guin feels that the painting is a malevolent force. Overcome with a sudden fear, she flees the gallery.

In the present, Guin reflects on the two years she spent aimlessly in Europe after seeing Ennis’s show, afraid to find him. Her aimlessness ended when she accepted the job promoting her mother’s books.

Back at her apartment building, the desk attendant, Tracee, casually mentions that Guin’s brother is upstairs and has his own key. Stunned, Guin rushes upstairs to find her apartment empty but feeling altered. She recalls small, unexplained occurrences over the past year and realizes that Ennis has been secretly entering her home. She finds the carved wooden hand from their childhood. He also defaced the cover of her memoir, blacking out the word “Memoir” and replacing it so that the subtitle reads, “A Fairy Tale” (187). Guin feels a startling sense of connection.

Nine months prior, Guin is in bed with Hank, who asks about her brother. She describes their childhood as a “two-person cult” and says she can hardly bear that Ennis lived two years without her (193). Hank pictures her as a shy, nerdy teenager, but Guin was actually popular at her new school. Her tragic backstory gave her a unique glamour, but she felt a deep sense of otherness, as if her life after the fire were merely an “epilogue.” She’s still trying to escape this feeling.

In the present, Guin hides the wooden hand. She has a nightmare in which she touches Ennis’s painting of the fire and is engulfed by flames, waking to find her own hands around her throat. She sees missed calls from an angry Hank, who informs her that he’s coming over that evening.

Guin calls Candy, Ennis’s assistant. Candy reveals that Ennis recently fired her and made her sign a non-disclosure agreement. Unable to speak freely, Candy gives Guin two names to investigate: Arthur Borelli and Marla Kaufman.

In 2003, Guin is writing at the Farmhouse when she’s interrupted by a new houseguest, a young writer named Arthur Borelli. He is one of many artists who visit the family, drawn by their fame. Arthur is impressed with Guin’s writing, and they agree to trade stories and give each other feedback. He gives her an advance copy of his novel, The Wandering Country.

Still in 2003, Guin reads The Wandering Country and is captivated by it. When Ennis finds her, he refers to Arthur as “Edith’s new boyfriend” (207). Sensing his jealousy, Guin lies and says that the book isn’t good. Edith’s long-term guests were always exceptionally talented, and a previous guest, a waitress who wrote an epic poem in a cherished notebook, had mysteriously left it behind when she departed without farewell.

Continuing the 2003 flashback, Guin develops a crush on Arthur. He gives her insightful notes on her story and praises her talent. He confides his disappointment that Edith has shown no interest in his work and admits that he has been having the same unsettling dream every night. Guin feels a jolt of recognition, recalling that her father had the same complaint years earlier. She urges Arthur to leave the Farmhouse, but he misinterprets her warning. She resolves to try again, but the next time she sees him, he and Edith are in a sexual embrace. Two days later, Arthur is gone.

The narrative returns to the present. Two days before the show, Guin returns from a run to find her email and phone flooded with messages reacting to a viral video. She discovers that Nisha Dey secretly recorded their conversation and posted an edited version to TikTok, making Guin appear to be accusing her brother of wrongdoing. Regina, calls, furious, and informs Guin that she’s “benched” from all promotional activities for her memoir. When Guin threatens to reveal things not in the book, Regina hangs up on her.

This chapter flashes back to a party at the Farmhouse in 2003, presented in the style of a film script. The children are stealing from guests’ coats while Llewellyn flirts with a model and Edith confers with her editor, Jonathan Froud. A male guest pulls Guin into his lap and holds her there while asking invasive questions. Llewellyn carefully lifts her free and strikes the man with a cupped palm to the ear; the man hurries toward the doorway with Llewellyn after him. The music starts again, and the incident is immediately forgotten by the other guests.

In another 2003 flashback, Guin and Ennis are confronted by a paparazzo on their property. The photographer taunts them until Ennis pulls out a small, ornate gun and fires a warning shot into the air. The terrified photographer backs away but continues taunting the children. After calling them “poor little fuckers” who don’t yet understand “how messed up” they are, he tells Ennis that he will watch for news of his overdose and tells Guin, “I look forward to your pornography career” (230).

Two months after the incident with the photographer, Guin finds Jonathan Froud in the kitchen. He shows her a magazine featuring a full-page, black-and-white photograph of her and Ennis—the one taken by the paparazzo. The image is beautiful and evocative, making the children look like fictional characters. Guin realizes that Jonathan is jealous of their fame. This photograph would become iconic, defining their childhood for the public as a perfect moment before everything fell apart.