The Ninth Month

The novel opens in the present day as Betsey Brown, a pregnant surgical nurse and Emily Atkinson's best friend, rushes to NYPD Detective Joel Tierney, a former high school classmate, to report that Emily has been missing for four days. Emily, a thirtysomething woman from a wealthy family in her last trimester of pregnancy, had previously confided that someone was following her. Betsey names a possible suspect: Mike Miller, Emily's former drug dealer. Tierney calls in his partner, Detective Kalisha Scofield, and the three rush to Emily's Lower East Side apartment. When Tierney opens the door, a sickening stench forces them back.

The narrative shifts nine months earlier to Emily's first-person account. Emily is a marketing executive who frequents Ted's Bar and Grill, run by bartender Ted Burrows, with whom she shares a flirtatious friendship. After drinking heavily and taking an MDMA pill purchased from Miller, Emily collapses outside the bar and has a heart attack. At the hospital, Betsey, the nurse assigned to her care, becomes Emily's first real ally. Doctors discover Emily is pregnant. Her ob-gyn, Dr. Jane Craven, raises the option of termination, but after confiding in Betsey, who is pregnant with her third child, Emily decides to keep the baby.

The investigation resumes inside Emily's ransacked apartment. The living room is destroyed, with furniture overturned and liquor bottles smashed. The stench comes from rotting food scattered from the refrigerator. The nursery Emily prepared, decorated in pale yellow and white, is strangely untouched, even though an earlier break-in had disturbed it. Inside, they find Emily's laptop containing a folder titled "A Kind of Diary," revealing Emily's loneliness, fear of being followed, and an unnamed romance. Betsey discovers blood in the guest bathroom. Before leaving, Kalisha pockets a flash drive from the laptop.

In Month Two, Keith Hennessey, chairman of Dazzle, the marketing firm where Emily works, fires her for chronic absenteeism and showing up drunk. Emily heads to Ted's Bar and accepts a martini despite her pregnancy. Days later, she experiences bleeding; Dr. Craven determines the pregnancy is still viable and warns that continued drinking could kill her baby. Emily confesses to Betsey that she visited an abortion clinic but left without going through with the procedure.

The investigation expands when detectives respond to the murder of Caitlin Murphy, a pregnant woman found dead in a nearby East Village apartment. Tierney finds Emily's name in the victim's phone contacts. The detectives also interview Dr. Mariana Micelli, Emily's hostile next-door neighbor, who speculates Emily killed herself. In Emily's account of Month Three, Micelli berates her and declares her unfit to have a baby. Emily does not tell Betsey about the encounter or her growing fear of being followed.

Betsey conducts her own investigation. Ted reveals that the last time he saw Emily, a stranger offered to walk her home. Miller insists he only sold Emily drugs. Betsey visits Quinn Langford Church, Emily's best friend from Princeton, who insists they never had a sexual relationship. Kalisha examines the flash drive and reads Emily's diary entries, including a troubling final entry whose content is withheld from the reader.

Emily's fourth month brings her parents' graveside funeral in Sharon, Connecticut. Her Aunt Dolly unleashes years of anger about how Emily's parents, Liz and Lionel Atkinson, neglected her emotionally. Greg Hayden, a former prep school classmate, reveals he has been following Emily around Manhattan for months; when she rejects his advances, he turns vicious. Shaken and drunk, Emily barely makes it home on the Taconic Parkway while drinking from a flask. She calls Betsey, reveals her parents' death almost as an afterthought, and hangs up.

The investigation uncovers a pattern. Kalisha connects Emily's case to Nina Powell, a search engine optimization expert who lived nearby and went missing four months earlier. Three women in their early thirties from the Lower East Side, all in media or marketing, are now two missing and one dead. At Dazzle, Keith Hennessey's assistant Charlie Bennett reveals that Keith and Emily had an affair and that Keith fired her partly because she became pregnant. A background check on Emily's former assistant David Zingerman reveals a prior drug arrest for which Emily posted bail, a connection he never disclosed.

In Month Five, Dr. Craven warns that the fetus has not grown as expected and demands complete sobriety. An ultrasound confirms the baby is a boy; Emily names him Oscar. She attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and briefly thrives at a receptionist job, then spirals into depression and becomes obsessed with the Nina Powell case. At Ted's Bar one night, a large man intervenes when Miller harasses her and reveals himself as Detective Tierney. They sleep together. Emily does not know Tierney is Betsey's old friend.

Months Six and Seven bring escalating danger. Emily is chased through Manhattan by a man in a black vest. She confronts Keith about being Oscar's father, but Keith reveals that a prostatectomy, the surgical removal of the prostate gland, left him sterile. Returning home, Emily finds her nursery torn apart with a note reading "NO BABY HERE. NO BABY HERE." She finally tells Betsey someone is following her.

Betsey tracks Quinn to a television studio in Queens, where he reveals Emily told him she married someone in Las Vegas. Betsey flies to Las Vegas and, at the Lucky Little Wedding Chapel, confirms Emily married Ted Burrows. The detectives confront Ted, who admits the marriage but denies being the baby's father. Kalisha discovers Miller once lived in Liverpool, England, under the alias Simon Paxton; a woman who accused him of assault was found dead. Searching Miller's apartment, the detectives find surveillance photos of Emily, Caitlin, and Nina, along with their driver's licenses and a bloody knife.

In Month Nine, Emily flees to her late parents' house in Sharon. Betsey tracks her there. Emily confesses her parents' deaths were a double suicide: Her mother had stage four pancreatic cancer, and her father shot them both rather than live without her. Emily confirms Ted is Oscar's father. When Betsey goes into labor, triggered by a severe allergic reaction to strawberries and with no working phones available, Emily delivers baby Amy in the bathtub under Betsey's direction.

Ted then arrives and reveals himself as the mastermind behind Emily's stalking. He never filed the annulment papers, meaning he and Emily are still legally married. As her spouse, if Emily dies, he inherits her parents' fortune. Tierney arrives with a gun and confirms his complicity, revealing he joined the scheme for money. He broke into Emily's apartment, staged the nursery vandalism, and steered the investigation away from Ted by using Miller as a convenient suspect. Betsey attacks Tierney while Emily jams a syringe into Ted's thigh and flees barefoot into the dark woods.

Ted catches Emily, and Tierney aims his gun at her. Before he can fire, Kalisha, who has been independently tailing Ted for weeks, shoots Tierney. Kalisha grew suspicious after the flash drive revealed that Tierney and Emily had slept together, a fact he concealed from his partner. EMTs load Emily and Betsey into ambulances. As Emily's ambulance speeds down the highway, her contractions intensify. The driver pulls over, and Emily delivers Oscar in the back of the stopped vehicle. The novel closes: "A life begins. Here's Oscar."