The Ten Year Affair

Cora, a content manager on maternity leave with her infant son Miles, meets Sam at a twice-weekly baby group in their small town. Sam is a stay-at-home father caring for his infant daughter, Penelope, while his wife, Jules, a bankruptcy lawyer, commutes to the city. They bond over shared mockery of a domineering group member they call Broccoli Mom. At home, Cora tells her husband Eliot, a nonfiction book editor, about the new friendship, and he encourages her to pursue it. The couple moved from Brooklyn after Cora's father died suddenly, leaving enough money for a house with persistent problems: a malfunctioning stove, a door that will not close, and a mushroom growing through the bathroom tile.

Cora and Sam leave the baby group and start meeting on their own. A physical attraction builds, and they kiss once at a bar. Sam resists taking things further. "So, if we can't be friends, what are we supposed to do," he jokes. "Have a ten-year affair?" (30). They laugh, but the idea lodges between them.

From this point, the novel operates on two parallel tracks. One is Cora's actual life: bills, the bathroom mushroom, the depositing and retrieving of children. The other is a technically fictional affair with Sam, an imagined reality where they check into a hotel one town away, have passionate sex, and exist free of consequence. Cora inhabits both simultaneously. As she sits in a work meeting, she is also drinking martinis with Sam. As she puts her kids to bed, she is also in the backseat of his car.

Cora returns to her desk job at a digital marketing company. Her evenings reveal the quiet strains of her marriage: Eliot gets high on the porch every night, and an antidepressant has eliminated his sex drive. Cora's college friend Isabelle visits from Brooklyn and, sensing the dynamic with Sam, advises that if Cora must get involved, she should befriend the wife. Cora follows this advice and takes Jules for drinks. The four adults begin socializing, and Cora and Sam join the school PTA, whose meetings become a pretext for them to linger together.

In the imagined affair, Cora admits she is in love. She and Sam accidentally conceive and decide to terminate the pregnancy, a choice that drives a wedge between them. In reality, Eliot's father dies of colon cancer and his mother suffers a fatal stroke two days later. Eliot takes a leave of absence and begins hiking the mountain in the dark, returning with scrapes and sticks in his hair. Cora shoulders the household alone.

Sam proposes that both families vacation together on Cape Cod. The trip intensifies the tension between Cora and Sam: she writes her name in sunscreen on his back, and in the evenings they ride bikes to a nearby pond and swim naked. Jules notices their wet hair at dinner and accuses them of having sex. That night, Cora tells Sam they must pull back entirely. He asks if that is what she wants. She says it is and leaves the room.

For six months, Cora avoids Sam. Then COVID-19 arrives, shutting everything down. Sam loses his job. Cora proposes the two families form a pod to share childcare. Forced together again, the imagined affair returns with hallucinatory intensity. Cora catches the virus and, delirious on the pullout bed she calls the deathbed, hallucinates bazaars, pagan ceremonies, and a volcanic eruption. Sam buys an old Mercedes to convert to biodiesel, a project he and Eliot pursue but never finish. The car sits in the driveway, inoperable, a souvenir from the pandemic.

Life resumes. Cora does not divorce Eliot. They paint their bedroom, sand the deck, and try to rediscover themselves. New neighbors, Richard and Celeste Hood, move in and join the social group. At the pool one afternoon, Jules casually says she would not mind if Sam cheated, then reveals that a law school friend has been messaging her since the pandemic. She plans to meet him and adds, looking at Cora, "Cora, you should know" (154). Cora takes Sam to lunch intending to warn him but cannot bring herself to say it. Meanwhile, the promotion Cora expected at work goes to her colleague Lily instead.

The turning point comes at a joint 40th birthday party for Eliot and Sam. During setup, Sam finds Cora alone in his bedroom and slides his arm around her waist. His watchband snags her necklace, a gold disk Eliot bought on their honeymoon in Rome, snapping the chain. At the party, Jules mandates that no one may dance with their own spouse. During a commotion, Sam beckons Cora upstairs. They have sex for the first time in reality, quickly, among the coats. The two timelines swap: The real affair has begun, and Cora's stable domestic life becomes the imagined one.

Cora and Sam meet regularly at the hotel. She invents a fictional colleague named Morgan to explain her absences. But the affair unravels through gossip. Richard Hood spots Sam leaving the hotel, and his daughter Sarah Beth, a friend of Cora's daughter Opal, repeats the sighting at Cora's kitchen table. Rumors about Jules's messages with her law school friend also spread. At a book club Cora joined at their friend Anita's urging, Jules rejects Cora's pick and reveals the group never wanted her as a member. They shove each other in the pantry, breaking a jar of vodka sauce.

Cora tells Sam the affair must end. They attempt a final weekend in New York, but Sam is drunk and bitter. He refuses to sleep with Cora and announces he will tell Jules everything, suggesting one of them should move away. "Why shouldn't yours get ruined?" he asks.

The timelines switch back. Cora's brother Drew flies in from La Jolla at their mother's urging. Over beers, Cora confesses she cheated, and Drew tells her to let herself off the hook. She and Sam relapse once, and afterward Sam tells her he has confessed to Jules, who called Cora her best friend. Cora is stricken.

Cora interviews at a literacy nonprofit and gets the job. A second mushroom pushes through the bathroom wall. Eliot insists on hiring a contractor, exhausting their savings. He steps down his antidepressant and initiates sex for the first time in years. Their lovemaking is satisfying and uncomplicated. Jules takes a job in Oakland and prepares to leave. On the porch, Cora apologizes. "He's not that great," Cora offers. Jules replies, "I know. Don't you know that I know?" (279).

Sam arrives and asks Cora to leave Eliot and marry him. Jules is leaving for California without him. Cora considers it briefly, then declines. "What if I told you your real life is happening elsewhere?" she says (285). Opal calls from upstairs that the Wi-Fi is out. Eliot stands beside Cora and adjusts her necklace, the gold disk now repaired. Earlier, the novel reveals, Eliot confronted her obliquely, asking whether a work conference she attended was real. She replied that he did not have to worry about it anymore, as close to a confession as she would get. He knew, and they moved forward. A bird takes flight toward the mountain. "What was exalted occurred alongside the ordinary every moment, ceaselessly. But you couldn't make it stay. You couldn't claim it as your own" (286).