The novel flashes back to Natalie’s youth. At 17, Natalie prepares to leave her small Idaho town for Harvard. Natalie’s father abandoned the family when she was 10, and her mother, Eliza, instructed Natalie and her older sister, Abigail, to tell the people in their conservative religious community that he had died to avoid scandal. Abigail is now engaged to her high school boyfriend, Bryce.

At the airport, Abigail warns Natalie not to do drugs. Eliza urges her to be kind, alluding to her daughter’s social awkwardness and lack of friends. Natalie believes Boston will be the intellectual haven she craves, where intelligence matters more than likability. As she walks to security, she deliberately avoids looking back at her family, thinking of Lot’s wife turning to salt.

Back in the present, Natalie wakes in pain from her injuries. Her body feels unusually aged, though there are no mirrors in the room to examine herself in. A young girl enters and introduces herself as Maeve. She tells Natalie it is Wednesday and that the man is out working with the boys, Abel and Noah. Natalie touches her stomach and, in a moment of horror, realizes she is no longer pregnant.

Maeve leads Natalie to the kitchen, where an older girl is making soap. Natalie recognizes the process from an early influencer video she once posted. She asks the girl who taught her to add herbs to the soap, and the girl replies that Natalie herself did.

The novel flashes back to Natalie’s college years once again. On her first night at Harvard, Natalie attends a party hosted by her new roommate, Reena Magliotti. Surrounded by wealthy, fashionable students, Natalie feels completely out of place in her prairie dress and long braid. The other girls mock her appearance and assume she is unintelligent.

Overwhelmed, Natalie leaves the party and sits alone in the common room. When she returns, Reena brings a boy back and has sex with him while Natalie lies frozen in the adjacent bed. After they finish and Reena leaves for the bathroom, Natalie vomits.

Back in the present, Natalie inspects the primitive farmhouse. It lacks modern amenities and mirrors her own home’s floor plan, but everything is deteriorated and old. Outside, she sees snowcapped mountains in the distance. She sees Noah leading a horse that resembles her family’s horse, albeit with slightly different markings. Feeling disoriented by the familiar-yet-foreign landscape, she retreats to the outhouse and clicks her heels together three times like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but nothing happens.

During her first semester at Harvard, Natalie lies to her mother during weekly phone calls, pretending college is going well. In reality, she finds her classes disappointing and feels repulsed by what she sees as wealthy, cynical peers who denounce traditional family structures and motherhood.

A breaking point comes when Reena taunts Natalie in front of friends, accusing her of thinking she is superior to everyone. Natalie retorts by calling Reena a “whore” and revealing that Reena lied about being assaulted on the first night of school. Reena physically attacks her.

Following the fight, Natalie is finally granted a single room. She isolates herself there, spending nights on internet forums researching why, in her view, modern women hate men, children, and themselves. Eventually, a girl from a campus Christian group expresses concern for Natalie’s disheveled appearance. Feeling homesick, Natalie begins attending the group’s meetings, where she meets Caleb Mills during her second semester.

Back in the present, an older girl managing the fire in the kitchen tells Natalie her name is Mary. Natalie is stunned: she recalls deciding to name her unborn daughter Mary at an ultrasound appointment. She wonders how these people could know the name, suspecting the older Caleb might be a stalker.

Mary orders Natalie to get firewood. On the porch, Natalie decides to flee and sprints toward the woods. Just as she enters the tree line, a steel trap clamps down on her ankle. The older Caleb rushes to her, releases the trap, and carries her back to the house, where Mary treats the wound and prepares to stitch it with a large needle and thick thread.

Natalie and Caleb court slowly and formally. On their first date, he tells her about his wealthy political family: his father, Senator Doug Mills; mother, Amelia; and four older brothers. On their second date, Natalie realizes just how wealthy Caleb is. He tells her he cannot stop thinking about her dream of owning a farm. By their fourth date, they have discussed marriage and shared their first kiss.

When Natalie and Caleb get engaged, Doug rents out a private room at a Boston steakhouse to bring their families together. Natalie meets Doug and Amelia for the first time. Eliza is awestruck by the four-carat engagement ring. Through silent looks, Natalie communicates to Eliza that she is choosing this path over the secular world she encountered at college.

Following the steel trap incident, Natalie sits with her injured foot elevated, having passed out twice during the stitching. Mary confronts her, insisting that Natalie is her mother and this is her home, and demands she stop behaving like a child.

The boys and older Caleb return from fishing. The family eats a simple meal of fish soup and biscuits. After dinner, Natalie develops a fever, and Mary helps her to bed and gives her a medicinal cherry-flavored syrup. Maeve is already in the bed and offers Natalie comfort. When Natalie asks what they call this home, Maeve replies that it is called “Yesteryear.”

During Natalie and Caleb’s wedding reception on the Mills estate, Abigail announces she is pregnant. That night, Natalie and Caleb, both virgins, have awkward and unsatisfying sex in the estate’s carriage house.

A year later, Natalie is six months pregnant and still enrolled at Harvard. She encounters Reena, who appears unwell after a series of personal humiliations. Feeling happy and beautiful for the first time, Natalie boasts about her marriage, pregnancy, and plans to leave school. She contrasts her imagined future with what she assumes will be Reena’s bleak, career-focused life, convinced she has made the better choice.

Present Natalie has a nightmare in which she gives birth to all her children simultaneously on a dirty floor. The attending doctor, husband, and midwife have mouths but no eyes. The babies have no feet. Everyone is calling for “Mama.”

Past Natalie gives birth to her first daughter, Clementine, in a hospital after panicking about her plan to do a home birth. She is horrified by the physical reality of childbirth and feels alienated from her baby. Experiencing severe postpartum distress, she tells Eliza she thinks there has been a mistake with the baby.

Eliza suggests she go for a jog to lift her spirits. Natalie sneaks out and attempts to jog around the parking lot, ripping her stitches and collapsing. Back in the room, Eliza comforts her by saying she can handle motherhood because she has no other choice, and tells her to get up and tend to the crying Clementine.

Mary wakes Natalie, echoing Eliza’s words at the hospital: It is time to get up. She threatens to amputate Natalie’s foot if she does not leave bed. Amid her fever, Natalie cannot be sure if she dreamed or actually remembers the older Caleb crawling into bed with her.

Maeve suggests they visit the chickens. Natalie dresses in drab pioneer-style clothing and uses a hand-carved walking stick to move around. Outside, she trips and finds a small black plastic object buried in the dirt that resembles a piece of a lapel microphone. She hides it in her skirt pocket.

Following Clementine’s birth, Natalie stays at her mother’s house and continues to experience severe postpartum depression. Abigail visits and confesses her own unhappiness with motherhood and her marriage to Bryce, mentioning she wants birth control. Natalie rebukes her.

Caleb visits with gifts: a phone, running shoes, and a baby carrier so she can take the baby jogging. His naivete confirms Natalie’s fear that she has confused his wealth with competence and made a grave mistake marrying him.

Natalie begins taking long walks and is inspired by the seemingly functional families she observes. She resolves to fake affection for Clementine until it becomes genuine, then confronts Caleb and asks when he will get a job.

In the chicken coop with Maeve, Natalie grips the microphone piece and develops a theory that she is the subject of a reality television show. She rationalizes that the violence she has experienced is staged entertainment for an audience she mentally dubs the “Angry Women.” Natalie deliberately avoids thinking about her vanished pregnancy. Standing in the coop, she says aloud that this reality show is terrible.

After Clementine’s birth, Caleb resists getting a job, suggesting they travel or buy a farm instead. The breaking point comes when Caleb does yoga in the driveway in full view of commuting neighbors. At her mother’s urging, Natalie calls Amelia to complain, and they drive to the Mills estate in tense silence.

Alone in Caleb’s childhood bedroom with a crying Clementine, Natalie thinks of the new semester starting at Harvard and accepts she will never complete her degree.

Maeve and Natalie bring eggs to the kitchen, where Mary manages breakfast by the hearth. Natalie chooses to make sourdough bread using a well-maintained jar of starter. The older Caleb brings raw milk, which Mary cleans and pours into containers. Mary then changes Natalie’s ankle dressing. As she works, Natalie silently grips the microphone fragment in her pocket, wondering if the Angry Women are watching her suffer.

At the Mills estate, Eliza advises Natalie that all husbands have quirks and it is a wife’s job to encourage normalcy. Natalie discovers Caleb spends his days playing video games and watching pornography.

Doug and Amelia stage an intervention, confessing they had hoped marriage would mature Caleb. Now they see it as Natalie’s responsibility to fix him. They reveal Caleb failed a business school interview and allude to a past incident where he harmed a classroom rabbit. Doug proposes getting him a low-stakes job at a friend’s vineyard.

That night, Caleb tells Natalie he wishes he could just play with babies for a living. Natalie has an epiphany that they are meant to remake each other: she will help him become a man, and he will help her become a better mother. The next day, she refuses Doug’s vineyard offer, insisting she will find Caleb something better herself.

Natalie’s attempt to bake bread fails, resulting in an inedible loaf. She and Mary argue, and Mary orders her to leave until she can control herself. Left alone on the porch, Natalie decides to take a slow walk down the road. Noah joins her from the barn. As they walk toward the trees, Natalie questions him about the horse and how far they ever go. Noah grows evasive and refuses to answer.

When Natalie orders him to keep walking, he refuses, claiming there are wolves, Indigenous Americans, and other evil souls beyond the trees, then runs back to the barn. The older Caleb barrels toward Natalie. Terrified, she drops her walking stick, falls to her knees, and begs for forgiveness in prayerful language.