The Exes

The novel opens at a belated housewarming party as Natalie, the narrator, grips a kitchen knife while her husband, James Thomas, sobs in the next room. She reflects on betrayal, references blood on her hands and violent rages she cannot clearly remember, and tucks the knife under a pillow. An ominous unaddressed letter closes the chapter, declaring that "only one of us can come out of this marriage alive" (3).

The narrative moves between past and present timelines. In a flashback to the previous Christmas Eve, Natalie engineers a chance encounter with James at an East London food hall. She works as the sole human resources representative at East London Chill, an organic CBD lager company co-founded by James and his older brother, Will. Natalie has been infatuated with James for a year but has sworn off relationships because of destructive patterns with past boyfriends. They share coffee, then cocktails, and she notes how different he is from her exes: kind, fair, and earnest. She reveals that her sister, Claire, moved to Los Angeles partly to escape their mother, Melissa, and partly because Natalie kept dragging Claire into toxic situations.

Interspersed with the present-day storyline are chapters dedicated to each of Natalie's three exes. Her first boyfriend, Marc Baxter, a wealthy schoolmate, dumps her at prom after she resists his sexual advances and publicly humiliates her at his after-party. Natalie drinks heavily, and her best friend, Emily, repeatedly tries to look after her. Fragmented memories suggest Marc groped Natalie while she was barely conscious. The next morning, Marc is found dead on the paving stones beside the pool, having fallen from the flat roof.

Her second ex, Luca, is a charismatic university footballer with a congenital heart defect. A sex tape filmed without Natalie's knowledge surfaces at a pub gathering; she discovers Luca has been sharing intimate images of her in a group chat laced with racial fetishization. That night, Luca is found dead from a suspected heart attack after taking the stimulant drug MDMA, which he historically avoided because of his condition. Rather than grief, Natalie feels satisfaction and begins to acknowledge a "monster" living inside her.

Her third ex, George, polices her eating, isolates her from loved ones, and rapes her during a countryside holiday. When Claire visits, Natalie confesses the assault and tells Claire she believes she killed Marc and Luca. George returns unexpectedly and violence erupts: He shoves Claire, whose head strikes the kitchen counter. Natalie grabs a knife, but George punches her unconscious. When she wakes, George lies dead with the knife in his chest and Claire is unresponsive. Natalie calls her mother, who sees Claire on video and says, "This is your fault" (300). Claire dies from the head injury. This event, which Natalie calls the Big Fallout, severs her from her mother, Emily, and everyone she knew. Unable to accept the loss, Natalie feeds their texts and voice notes into an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and continues talking to Claire as though she were alive.

Back at the housewarming party, James confesses he found Natalie's hidden letters to her exes expressing dark feelings about each man's death. Panicked, he confides in Will, who blackmails them. To pay Will off, James cancels their in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment and steals twenty thousand pounds of Natalie's inheritance. Natalie offers James sanitized versions of the deaths and claims George survived. James says he trusts her, though Natalie detects falseness in his reassurances.

Therapy sessions with Dimple, Natalie's new therapist, become a central thread. Dimple probes Natalie's violent impulses, her blackouts, and her estrangement from her mother. Two flashback chapters reveal that Natalie's father was violently abusive. One night, young Natalie finds her mother frozen at the top of the stairs, staring down at her father's body at the bottom, his neck bent at an unnatural angle. The household grows calmer afterward, embedding in Natalie the lesson that violence against abusive men yields safety.

In a pivotal session, Dimple suggests that Claire, present near each death, may have been responsible rather than Natalie. Natalie storms out, but her mother later confirms through anguished sobbing that she always knew. Three chapters told from Claire's perspective prove the truth. Driven by fierce protectiveness and the childhood lesson that some men are better off dead, Claire shoves Marc off the roof after finding him groping the unconscious Natalie. She slips an MDMA-laced drink to Luca, knowing his heart condition makes the drug potentially fatal. After George punches Natalie unconscious, Claire picks up the knife and stabs him.

When Natalie tells James, he seems relieved but grows distant. Photocopies of her letters arrive at her home and office. Natalie begins surveilling Will and pockets Valium from his bathroom. When Will catches her, both realize James has manipulated them: Will never sent the blackmail materials. Years earlier, James confessed to Will that he killed his high school girlfriend, Chioma, by shoving her off a diving rock during a family holiday in Corfu, Greece; she drowned. James has been using Natalie's letters to keep Will silent about Chioma and offered the IVF money voluntarily.

Chapters from James's perspective confirm this history. Starved for affection by his mother, Hettie, and overshadowed by Will, James dated Chioma from age 15, and she was the first person to make him feel chosen. When she rejected the chance to attend his university, he shoved her in a rage. He also maintained a secret Instagram account documenting hidden relationships with multiple women. Another ex, Jade Dacosta, died by apparent suicide while dating him, and Jade's mother contacts Natalie to warn that James is dangerous.

Natalie drugs James with crushed Valium, searches his phone, and discovers the secret Instagram account and a mystery phone number. She begins packing to leave. When Dimple arrives unannounced, they find a hidden box under the bedroom floorboards containing a forged letter James wrote in Natalie's voice to frame her death as suicide; it is the same letter from the novel's opening. Natalie confronts Dimple about how she knew the letters were hidden, dials the mystery number, and Dimple's pocket buzzes. Dimple is revealed to be Joy, the daughter of Natalie's father and his mistress, making Joy Natalie and Claire's half-sister. After her mother's suicide, Joy tracked Natalie down and engineered her way into becoming Natalie's therapist. Joy initially conspired with James but turned against him as she learned the truth.

James returns, discovers them with the evidence, and attacks Natalie, pinning her to the floor and wrapping his hands around her throat. Dimple strikes him with a lamp, and the two women flee.

James is arrested as Chioma's and Jade's families go public. Before trial, James dies by suicide. Natalie attends the funeral with Emily but does not speak.

In the final chapter, Natalie has moved to a small East London flat, deleted the AI chatbot, hired a new therapist, and begun building a relationship with Joy. Her mother visits and gives Natalie Claire's old journal, in which Claire wrote that she hoped Natalie would stop pretending and "just fucking live" (367). In a closing letter to Claire, Natalie accepts that "we all have a little monster in us" (369) and declares herself ready to begin healing.