At the primitive Yesteryear homestead, Natalie is on house arrest, her ankles bound together with a rope made of towels. Mary makes her perform numerous tasks while moving awkwardly, hoping to see her fall. When Natalie complains, Mary says she is following orders from Old Caleb, who threatened to tie Natalie to a horse overnight if she causes more trouble.

As Mary makes butter by hand, Natalie suddenly remembers using an electric mixer back when she was an influencer. Mary asks why Natalie keeps trying to run away. Natalie tells her the truth: She is not supposed to be here, or rather, here should be different. Mary dismisses this and warns about the dangers of the woods. Natalie shouts that Mary, Old Caleb, and the other children are not her family. Mary sends her for firewood, asserting her authority. At dinner, Mary offers Natalie bread with fresh butter as a peace offering. The butter is delicious.

The novel flashes back to the past. One morning, Caleb bursts into the bedroom announcing he has found his purpose: substituting as a kindergarten teacher at his old private school. When Natalie asks about the salary, he admits he did not inquire. She realizes he would want the job permanently, resigning them to a life she considers beneath them.

She challenges him by claiming schools teach children anti-Christian values, an idea she privately admits is a third-hand rumor. Caleb is skeptical of the criticism, but doubts that it applies to kindergarten. She switches tactics, leveraging her mother’s audience trick to steer him toward a more rigorous career. Caleb misunderstands the idea and imagines an audience of angels. She realizes the strategy only works on someone without the option to refuse, which Caleb always has always had.

Natalie asks what Caleb wanted to be as a child. Caleb replies an actor or a cowboy. Natalie suddenly imagines Doug being compared to John Wayne when he is proclaimed president, leaving Caleb enthralled. Recalling their wistful talk of living on a farm on their first date, Natalie formulates a new plan: a substitute teaching job is humiliating, but a real-life cowboy is a persona she can build on. Caleb does not need to be good at farming; he just needs to learn to pretend.

At the Yesteryear homestead one evening, Natalie asks Old Caleb to untie her, promising not to run away. Old Caleb agrees. Mary brings Natalie a bitter tonic to help her sleep, telling her that it will make the bad feelings go away and that she should trust her. Natalie does not trust anyone, least of all herself, but accepts it as another peace offering. Her gaze drifts across the family and kitchen, and she thinks variations of the idea, “This is my husband, this is not my husband” (161). Seeing sleep as her only brief escape, she drinks the tonic. Mary helps her to bed.

Following her resolution to make Caleb a cowboy, Natalie enlists Eliza to search for large plots of land. They find a listing for a 500-acre cattle ranch in Idaho. Natalie calls the owner from a coat closet to plead her case against competing bids, insisting her husband is a natural farmer and they want a true American childhood for their children. When her realtor informs her another buyer was chosen, Natalie instructs her to offer half a million over asking. The offer is accepted.

Natalie goes to Doug’s office to secure funding. He complains that consultants have told him he is old and out of favor. Natalie accidentally oversteps by mentioning his policies; he corrects her that politics is about messaging. She placates him by calling herself a “housewife,” a word that feels both painful and correct to her, and presents her plan for the ranch. Doug says he has half a mind to fund it just to watch it fall apart, then agrees to five million dollars on one condition: he wants her to have more babies with his son. The moment turns cold and mechanical. He tells her to stop breastfeeding to improve her chances of conceiving, and she agrees, hiding the reality of her poor sex life with Caleb.

Leaving Doug’s office, Natalie sees Amelia crushing a pill into pudding. Upstairs, she finds Caleb deep in a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, convinced the country is trying to feminize men. She shows him the ranch listing. He is enthralled and agrees on the condition that they have sex regularly during her fertile window. He adds that they will homeschool the children, and that they will not use the ranch to harvest beef because eating beef, he claims, is like eating terror. Bewildered but seeing her goal within reach, Natalie agrees. When Caleb says they need a name for the ranch, Natalie tells him she already has one in mind.

At the Yesteryear homestead, Natalie gets through the night without any nightmares. The next morning, she asks Mary if she can shower. Mary takes her outside to a tin washbasin, unwraps her ankle bandage to reveal the stitched wound, and washes her with ice-cold water and homemade soap while chiding her about the inconvenience. Natalie begins to cry from the relief of being clean. Mary calls her “Mama” for the first time, making Natalie cry harder.

Natalie and Maeve prepare breakfast and bake bread, then go to the barn to treat the cow for an udder infection. Inside, Natalie notices a scythe, an ax, and a rake on the wall and feels a wave of queasiness, dismissing them as props. Later, Maeve and Mary spot cloud shapes on a hill, noting their resemblance to a bunny and a horse. Natalie sees a landscape that looks like Hell, and she thinks this happily. She realizes she feels fine because of Mary’s tonic. She enjoys her inebriated state. Six hours later, a beaming Natalie announces that dinner is ready.

During the Heller Mills family’s first three years on Yesteryear Ranch, Natalie shares only six pictures on her social media profiles.

The first picture shows Natalie and one-year-old Clementine in front of the barn with the caption, “Surprise! We bought a farm” (178). A flashback reveals their first breathtaking view of the ranch on inspection day. The photo receives four likes from Abigail, Eliza, Amelia, and Caleb.

The second picture shows a snowy landscape. A black mold infestation delays their move-in, forcing a longer stay with Doug and Amelia. During this time, Caleb develops a passion for farming, Clementine learns to say “Mama,” Doug launches a presidential campaign, and Amelia’s pill use increases. Doug gets Botox at his consultants’ suggestion, returning home looking frightened.

The third picture is a carousel of chicks, a cow, and a dirt-covered Caleb captioned with hashtags promoting life on the farm. Clementine is nearly three, and Natalie is desperate to conceive again. The chicks die, the dairy cow gets mastitis and dies, and Caleb hires men to burn the carcass. Natalie insists they hire farm workers and have sex. They have a brief, joyless encounter, and a new cow arrives the next day.

The fourth picture shows the Mills family on stage at an election party. On Doug’s Senate reelection night, Caleb’s brother, David, finds Amelia passed out and covered in pudding vomit. Paramedics are made to sign NDAs before treating her. Doug gives a speech praising Caleb’s farm work, misrepresenting it as a meat and dairy operation.

The fifth picture is a romantic photo of Caleb dipping and kissing Natalie captioned “I always wanted my very own cowboy” (185). Natalie tries to initiate sex for conception, but Caleb is exhausted and impotent. After her efforts fail, she wakes him by dropping a cereal bowl on his stomach and demands a semen sample. He complies, and she inseminates herself with a sauce baster.

The sixth picture shows Natalie, five months pregnant with her second child, Samuel, holding Clementine. She expresses gratitude to God for their growing family.

In the present, Natalie describes her days at the Yesteryear homestead blending together in an uneven cycle of good and bad. On good days, she wakes determined and optimistic, moving through her chores, which include ironing, sweeping, and potato peeling, with the obedient pluck of a picture-book pioneer woman. She nicknames Maeve her “little shadow” and finds comfort in the girl’s constant chatter. On bad days, she lies staring at the ceiling, her thoughts spiraling between the need to escape and the fear that she might die in 1855. She drags herself through the same rotation of tasks, sustained only by the fantasy that a celebrity with a camera crew will soon arrive to end the nightmare.

She narrates the process of doing laundry in extended, agonized detail: scrubbing clothes by hand in three aluminum tins of frigid water with lye soap that burns and cracks her fingers, all while watching Old Caleb and the boys grow dirtier in the fields. The heavy, poorly sewn dresses make her clumsy. Her only respite is in the evening, when she sits by the fire with Mary and Maeve, stitching clothes and listening to their sweetly limited conversations. She feels herself getting less intelligent by the day but stays silent, clinging to the belief that someone, somewhere, must be watching her.

Eliza proposes a weekend visit to Yesteryear with Abigail and her children. It is the Heller Mills’ second summer on the farm; Samuel is two months old. Natalie checks Reena’s Instagram daily and tells herself she is thriving by comparison, though she keeps forgetting to order furniture for Clementine’s nearly bare room.

When Natalie’s family arrives, Caleb greets them in a forced cowboy accent. Abigail’s children spill out of the van, and Clementine drops Natalie’s hand to follow them. During a tour of the house, Natalie boasts about a coming renovation, and Abigail offers to take her old appliances, a polite way of asking for hand-me-downs. Natalie privately worries that the money Doug gave her is nearly gone: $5 million dollars spent in three years without earning a single penny in return. Outside, Eliza surveys the fields with open dismay, and Abigail lights a cigarette, pointedly asking whether Natalie ever tires of the smell on this farm. That evening, the family attends a rodeo and eats at a country-fried steak house, where Caleb explains the “manosphere,” an idea he has picked up from men’s-rights forums, to Eliza at length.

Back at the house, Abigail announces she is leaving her husband Bryce. Natalie erupts, listing every grim consequence from poverty to losing custody of her children until Abigail is sobbing and asking what she should do. Eliza comforts Abigail while Natalie walks away, remembering the prenuptial agreement she signed before her wedding and the later financial document that placed the ranch solely in Caleb’s name. She finds Caleb cheerfully bathing all the children and reflects on the unsettling reality that her husband legally owns everything they have, and that even a kind and oblivious man could become dangerous if he ever realized it.

Old Caleb warns Natalie of an approaching snowstorm. He tells her he does not like hitting her and blames her for making him do it. He announces he will be sharing her bed again that night. Natalie reflects on the irony that she once prayed for Caleb to become exactly this type of man. When she tells him she is no longer interested in being a mother and wife, he raises his hand to strike her but stops. She asks why she is here; he tells her to go home if she wants to. When she asks if he will stop her, he says something else will. She feels a chill, knowing he means the woods.

The storm hits suddenly. As hail pounds the roof, Natalie fantasizes about being taken hostage by Indigenous Americans, reflecting that pioneer women were already hostages to their husbands. That night, Old Caleb enters her bedroom and sexually assaults her. It is painful, but to survive she tells him she loves him, and the pain eventually transforms into an intense, heavenly pleasure. She climaxes, feeling as though God is answering her prayers.

Later, while he sleeps, Natalie goes to the kitchen and has a revelation: She theorizes her entire experience is a divine test from God. She prays with gratitude, then crouches and scrapes his semen from her body. She makes two promises to herself: to never forget God’s message, and to not get pregnant in this place.

Eliza shares her concerns about the farm, the renovation, Caleb, and the children with Natalie. Natalie has a devastating realization that they are failing at make-believe, and that Doug will let them slowly slide into poverty, trapping her there. Eliza then reveals that a friend spotted a pesticide barrel in one of Natalie’s photos, exposing that their produce is not organic. Natalie is furious. She had secretly instructed the farm workers to spray pesticides at night to save the crops. When her mother says she just wants Natalie to be happy, Natalie angrily retorts that she looks happy.

After Eliza and Abigail leave, Clementine says she wants to live with her cousins, and Samuel starts wailing. Overwhelmed, Natalie thinks of what Reena would do and lands on the idea of a thirst trap. She announces she wants a photo taken immediately and, after Caleb’s attempts to help her fail, she takes over and snaps hundreds of selfies until she gets the perfect shot: a close-up of her smiling face with her family walking away in the background. She posts it with the caption expressing incredulity over her life, stressing that what she is posting is real. She tells herself this is the most important day of her life, the day she returns to work on the project of herself. After dinner, Natalie inseminates herself again.

At the Yesteryear homestead, Natalie and Maeve spend the day sewing hats for the chickens. Mary goes to the woods to collect saffron and returns late in the afternoon looking distracted, staring out the window. Instead of scolding them for wasting time and fabric, she tells Maeve to finish her work on the hats. Natalie notices Mary’s hands are shaking.

Natalie asks how her walk was, noting she looks like she has seen a ghost. After sending Maeve away, Mary says she found a mink caught in a trap, which upset her. She begins to cry. Natalie finds this unbelievable, knowing Mary has an iron stomach. Before Mary can respond, Maeve returns, and Mary snaps at Natalie, calling her by her first name for the first time. The moment is broken when Old Caleb and the boys arrive. Mary avoids Natalie for the rest of the night.

Two years have passed since Natalie’s family visited Yesteryear. She has had another son, Stetson, and is pregnant again. Abigail finalized her divorce; she has a new baby and is living with Eliza while working at a grocery store. Natalie has over a thousand Instagram followers but little engagement. When Doug cuts his financial support to focus on his presidential run, Natalie enrolls in a $1,500 online social media marketing course run by an influencer named Tammy Lane.

Tammy Lane delivers a motivational speech about the Divine Christian Feminine from her immaculate kitchen. Natalie finds the content generic but participates, trying to understand Tammy’s success. In a breakout room, the group, which includes Natalie’s direct competitors, other female farmers from Idaho, critiques Natalie’s account, calling it stiff and unlikable. They say her smile looks like a grimace and that she looks like she is pretending. Cassidy, Tammy’s niece, advises her to practice in a mirror. That night, six-year-old Clementine finds Natalie practicing her smile. Natalie tells her that smiling is how you make other people feel safe, warm, and loved, and shows her how to make it reach her eyes.

At the Yesteryear homestead, Mary has been sleeping in and behaving short-tempered all week. One evening, she walks out and sits on the porch stairs, and Old Caleb orders Natalie to go talk to her, calling it women’s business. Mary asks if anyone has ever lied to her. Natalie reflects on her mother’s lies about motherhood and the insincerity she has observed among women.

She sees a shimmer around Mary and becomes convinced the Lord is present, speaking through her in a divine test. Prompted by this presence, Natalie explains that lying is the nature of sin and that confession brings forgiveness. The Lord then seems to ask if she has anything to confess. Trembling, she starts to name Caleb, her father-in-law, and Clementine.

The divine presence vanishes. Mary, looking dull and sad, asks if Natalie just said “Clementine.” Natalie denies it. Mary stares at her for a long moment before going back inside. Natalie follows her.

Reena posts a video announcing she has been laid off. Natalie feels a mix of pity and scorn. By contrast, Natalie now has three thousand followers and is nine months pregnant with her fourth child, Jessa. Caleb rushes in and brings her to the barn, where he has installed a high-tech office in a former supply closet. He shows her a livestream in which a popular, bearded host is praising her Instagram account, calling her a wholesome, traditional “Aryan” wife and a model for the nation. Caleb explains the host belongs to the manosphere and has tens of millions of subscribers. As the host continues to describe Natalie’s account, inventing details like that she bakes all her own bread and shuns microwaves, Natalie watches her follower count climb from 3,000 to 20,000. She feels there has been a mistake, as the host is misrepresenting her account.

Over the next 24 hours, Natalie’s account grows to over 300,000 followers. Many new followers are hostile, leaving comments calling Natalie fake and a cultist. Caleb observes that there are a lot of angry women.

At the Yesteryear homestead, the family celebrates Abel’s 13th birthday. Old Caleb declares him a man and takes a terrified-looking Abel into the woods for an initiation rite. Noah is sad about being left behind; Maeve is told she can never go. Natalie tries to cheer them up by suggesting they ride the horse. Noah yells that horses are not meant to be ridden and that she does not understand anything. Mary scolds him, but he cries that Natalie is a useless mother, then runs to the barn. Hours later, Mary brings a sleeping Noah back in her arms. By sunset, Old Caleb and Abel have not yet returned.

At 5:30 in the morning, having been up for hours to do her hair and makeup, Natalie is filming a cooking video. It has been three months since she went viral, and she now has a million followers. She reflects on what she has learned: An influencer must be both lovable and unbearable to be addicting; her audience of Angry Women needs her perfection in order to criticize it; and the less a woman speaks, the better. When she realizes she is out of twine for a recipe, she wakes Caleb, leaves three-month-old Jessa in the car, and runs into Whole Foods.

Inside, a woman recognizes her and tries to engage with her. Natalie attempts to perform her Online Natalie persona, but the interaction is awkward. In the parking lot, the woman stops her again, this time to thank her. She explains that Natalie’s account helped her through a difficult postpartum period. Then she asks if Natalie left the baby alone in the car. Natalie panics and gives a poor excuse; the woman looks disturbed.

Doug calls, pressuring her to post political content for his presidential campaign. She refuses and holds him to their original agreement. He threatens to reveal how much money he gave her for the ranch and warns of a coming civil war. Natalie hangs up on him. In the store, she also sees a message request from Reena, now an intern at America News, asking for an interview.

That night, Caleb finds Natalie in the kitchen still working on a roast she forgot to serve for dinner. The children have not yet eaten anything. Overwhelmed, Natalie suggests they need a nanny. Caleb retorts that the children need a mother, then softens and agrees to a full-time babysitter. Natalie hugs him for the first time in years and cries. She reflects on the gap between herself and Online Natalie, a persona she has designed to be good at being alive, and resolves to close it.

At the Yesteryear homestead, a stretch of calm has settled over the family. Mary’s mood has lifted, and Abel has returned from his initiation trip with Old Caleb looking proud, telling Noah he will share the details only when Noah is old enough. Noah now drifts through his days looking dazed and eager for his own turn.

Natalie feels closer to God than she has in her entire life. She recalls how, as a young girl, she thought of the Lord the way her classmates thought of crushes, doodling His name in her notebook and feeling occasional waves of overwhelming, almost physical communion. This sensation vanished the day she married Caleb. Now that feeling has returned; she experiences it everywhere, including during sex with Old Caleb. She continues to interpret her experience on the homestead as a divine trial designed solely for her. She fantasizes that one day, she might be remembered as a saint.

Weeks pass in a haze of exhaustion. The temperature falls and the family crowds around the fire each evening. Mary finishes sewing a third pair of sock puppets for Maeve, who is so overjoyed she bursts into tears. Natalie finds this moment endearing, but then her thoughts turn to her other children from before she woke up in 1855, and the warmth drains out of her. The rest of the household notices the shift and gives her space. One morning, Natalie wakes to two simultaneous realizations: Nearly two months have passed since Old Caleb hit her, and her period has not come.

A live-in babysitter named Louise Crenshaw arrives at the farm on a windy spring morning. Natalie is pleased by how well Louise fits the visual world of the ranch. Louise wins the children over quickly, and Natalie uses the interaction as a rehearsal for being her online persona in real life, managing the conversation without any awkward missteps. Louise requests that she not appear in any online content, a boundary that happens to match a clause in her contract. When Louise asks to be called simply by her first name, Natalie insists on the title “Nanny Louise,” and Louise concedes.

Over coffee in town, Eliza voices concern about the children’s online visibility. Natalie waves her off and learns that Abigail is now dating a progressive pastor named Ben and has started consulting a therapist. When Natalie discovers that Abigail has unfollowed her Instagram account, she calls her sister to ask why. Abigail tells her that watching Natalie’s online persona feels disorienting and unrecognizable, like a stranger replaced her sister. She hangs up before the conversation can escalate into an argument.

Back at the ranch, Caleb confronts Natalie about $80,000 in Instagram advertising revenue that was deposited into an unfamiliar bank account. Natalie plays dumb, blaming forgetfulness from pregnancy, but Caleb reveals that the accountants have already traced four months of misrouted payments totaling over $200,000 and redirected them into the family business account. Rattled, Natalie locks herself in the bathroom and calms herself by silently reciting affirmations about her perfect life. Later that night, she calls Instagram’s support line to arrange for future payments to be quietly divided between the official account and a new personal one she has just opened.