Mae Tuck wakes from sleep and prepares to ride out and meet her sons Jesse and Miles for their first visit in ten years.

Winnie Foster sits in her fenced yard and confesses to a toad that she wants to run away and make a difference in the world.

A man in a yellow suit stops at the Foster gate at sunset and hears a strange, lilting melody drifting from the nearby wood.

Winnie ventures into the forbidden wood for the first time and finds a handsome boy named Jesse Tuck drinking from a hidden spring.

Mae and Miles arrive in the clearing, and the Tuck family kidnaps Winnie and rides away on horseback to explain their secret.

The Tucks take turns telling Winnie how drinking from the spring eighty-seven years ago left them unable to age or die.

The man in the yellow suit hides near the Tuck home and secretly listens to the family's entire story about the spring.

Tuck rows Winnie across a pond and explains that the Tucks are stuck like a motionless boat while all of life flows past them.

The man in the yellow suit offers Winnie's family a trade: he will bring Winnie home in exchange for ownership of the wood.

The man in the yellow suit arrives at the Tuck house at breakfast and demands the family help him locate the spring.

Mae Tuck strikes the man in the yellow suit over the head with a shotgun just as the constable rides into the yard.

The constable reports to Winnie's family that the man in the yellow suit has died and that Mae is charged with his murder.

Jesse visits Winnie at her fence, gives her a bottle of spring water, and begs her to drink it when she turns seventeen.

At midnight, Winnie helps the Tucks break Mae out of jail by slipping through the cell window and taking Mae's place inside.

The Tucks return to a transformed Treegap and discover from a cemetery grave that Winnie chose mortality and passed away years earlier.

The story begins with Mae Tuck riding to meet her immortal sons and Winnie Foster longing to escape her sheltered life in Treegap. When Winnie ventures into the forbidden wood and finds Jesse Tuck drinking from a magical spring, the Tuck family kidnaps her to protect their secret, explaining how they accidentally gained immortality eighty-seven years ago. A scheming man in a yellow suit secretly follows the Tucks home, overhears their story, and strikes a deal with Winnie's family to retrieve her in exchange for ownership of the wood. The man's confrontation at the Tuck house ends violently when Mae strikes him to protect Winnie, leading to his death and Mae's arrest for murder. Winnie races to help the Tucks free Mae from jail before she is hanged — a hanging that would expose the family's immortal secret to the world. In the epilogue, the Tucks return to find Winnie has chosen to live and die as a mortal, closing a life forever shaped by one extraordinary week.

The core story of Winnie Foster, the Tuck family, and the secret spring.

Tuck groans awake from a dream of his family together in heaven and is scolded by Mae for dwelling on impossible things.

Mae tucks her music box into her skirt pocket before leaving, aware that her reflection has not changed in eighty-seven years.

Winnie's grandmother steps outside to question the man in the yellow suit at the gate, but he ignores her questions entirely.

Winnie follows her toad into the forbidden wood and eventually discovers a sunlit clearing with a massive ash tree at its center.

The Tuck family rides past the man in the yellow suit on the road while fleeing with Winnie, leaving him in the dust.

Jesse tells Winnie the full truth — that he stopped aging at seventeen and expects to remain that age until the end of the world.

Winnie marvels at the cheerful disorder of the Tuck house and wonders if they don't tidy up because they think they have forever.

Mae explains to Winnie that the family must pack up and move every few years so that neighbors don't notice they never age.

While the family is out on the evening pond, Miles calls out that someone has stolen the Tucks' horse from the yard.

Winnie and Miles go fishing at dawn, and Winnie begs him to throw back a struggling fish he pulls from the water.

Miles tells Winnie about the wife and children who left him decades ago after realizing he was never going to grow older.

Winnie's grandmother explains that toads don't drink water but absorb it through their skin while Winnie tries to give a toad a drink.

A fierce thunderstorm breaks out during the midnight escape, and a crack of thunder covers the sound of Miles pulling free the cell bars.

The constable discovers Mae's cell is empty, Winnie has taken Mae's place overnight, and the gallows have been blown over by the storm.

A passing truck nearly crushes a toad on the road outside Treegap, and Tuck scoops up the creature without knowing its connection to Winnie.

Beneath the main plot, a series of smaller moments reveals the richness of each character's inner world and fills in the story's texture. Mae's morning rituals and Tuck's recurring dreams show how differently the family members cope with immortality, while small encounters — like Winnie's grandmother facing the man in yellow or Jesse confessing he will stay seventeen forever — add depth to the central conflict. Life at the Tuck house exposes Winnie to a completely different way of living, and her dawn fishing trip with Miles gives her a window into the grief of a man who outlived his own family. As the crisis deepens, seemingly small details like the stolen horse, the approaching storm, and a grandmother's offhand remark about toads prove unexpectedly significant. The pool closes in the epilogue, where a near-miss with a toad on the road quietly signals the lasting consequence of Winnie's final act of kindness.

The quieter moments and supporting scenes that give the story its texture.

The narrator describes Mae's ride, Winnie's restlessness, and the stranger's arrival as spokes of the same wheel turning unknowingly toward one another.

The cows of Treegap instinctively walk around the wood rather than through it, avoiding the hidden spring buried at the ash tree's roots.

After hearing music from the wood the night before, Winnie decides not to run away but to investigate the trees for its source.

Jesse stands on the spring and covers it with his body, looking frightened, to prevent Winnie from drinking the water.

Mae arrives in the clearing, surveys the scene of Jesse blocking Winnie from the spring, and declares that the worst is happening at last.

The Tucks reveal that Tuck shot himself years ago to confirm once and for all that the spring had made them impossible to kill.

Winnie decides the Tucks' story of immortality must be true because they are too warm and earnest to be lying.

Tuck and Mae slip to Winnie's bedside in the night and tell her they are sorry for dragging her into their secret life.

Jesse visits Winnie in the night and proposes she drink from the spring at seventeen so the two of them can live together forever.

Riding home after Mae's arrest, Winnie realizes Mae cannot be hanged because she will not die, which would expose the family's secret.

Tuck gazes at the dying man in the yellow suit with deep longing, envying the one thing the man has that the Tucks can never experience.

Winnie tells the constable she came with the Tucks willingly, halting the argument over whether Mae had kidnapped her.

Winnie takes the bottle of spring water Jesse gave her and pours it over the toad outside her fence to protect the creature forever.

Tuck finds Winnie's grave in the Treegap cemetery and stands over it feeling both deep sorrow and quiet relief at the choice she made.

Mae and Tuck share a moment of grief for Jesse, who is somewhere far away and does not yet know that Winnie has died.

This pool traces the story through its most pivotal revelations and emotional turning points, beginning with the narrator's warning that seemingly unrelated events are secretly connected. Each key discovery — Jesse blocking the spring, Mae's alarmed declaration, the family's confirmation of immortality through self-harm — shifts the story in a new direction and forces characters to face what eternal life truly means. Winnie's quiet nights at the Tuck house bring her face to face with Jesse's romantic proposal and the older Tucks' deep sorrow, deepening her bond with the family and her understanding of their burden. The crisis at the jailhouse demands Winnie act on everything she has learned, and her choice to help free Mae is shadowed by her chilling realization that a public hanging would expose the secret to the world. The pool ends in the epilogue with the Tucks grieving for Jesse, who is far away and does not yet know that Winnie chose mortality and is gone, closing the story on a note of bittersweet acceptance.