The novel follows twenty-five-year-old Carson Brant, a lifelong Brooklyn resident whose life has almost completely stalled after the death of her mother from cancer. Her father died when she was a child, so her mother’s death has left her effectively without family, alone in the deteriorating brownstone where she grew up. She works part-time at a bookstore owned by Kerry, her mother’s best friend, but even Carson knows Kerry mostly employs her out of obligation. She has little money, no career plan, and an increasingly serious dependence on alcohol. She drinks when she is lonely, when she is grieving, when she is nervous, and when she is bored, constantly promising herself that the next time she will stop after two or three drinks and almost never doing so. On her birthday, which she does not want to celebrate because birthdays sharpen her awareness of loss, her longtime friend Nicole persuades her to go drinking. At the Brooklyn Inn, Carson gets extremely drunk, joins a pool game, and meets Jasper Stewart, a handsome, charismatic man in his early fifties. Their conversation immediately feels unusually intimate. They bond over books and even discover that they both annotate passages they love. Carson takes Jasper home, where he notices one of the novels on her shelf and reveals that he wrote it. He is a celebrated author whose work Carson has admired for years, particularly Among Enemies, a novel about grief that meant a great deal to her after her father died. The next morning Carson studies the jacket biography and discovers the obvious complication she had failed to ask about: Jasper has a wife and children. When Jasper contacts her again, Carson meets him anyway. She directly asks about his family, and Jasper admits he is still married, that the marriage is not open, and that he has two sons. He claims he has never cheated before. Carson knows exactly what continuing means, yet she is so desperate for attention, distraction, and the sensation of being wanted that she invites him home again. They begin an affair. Jasper’s attention temporarily fills the enormous emptiness left by her mother’s death, while Carson’s drinking continues alongside it. Their first intense weekend together ends with Jasper returning to his family, and for the next couple of months he virtually disappears from her life.
During that absence, Carson tries to keep functioning. She remembers her mother’s illness in painful fragments: the failed treatments, the physical deterioration, the moment her mother calmly announced that chemotherapy was no longer working and that she wanted to stop treatment, and Carson’s guilt over accepting that decision rather than forcing her to continue fighting. At the bookstore, Carson has become popular with two brothers who attend story hour, shy, intelligent Wyatt and his younger brother Cameron. Their glamorous mother, Camille Irving, is a high-level buyer at Bergdorf Goodman and urgently needs a new nanny. She offers Carson twice her bookstore pay and health insurance. Carson accepts, partly because she needs the money. When Camille gives her a tour of their expensive brownstone, Carson sees photographs and eventually a familiar phone. Then Camille calls her husband upstairs. The husband is Jasper. Both Carson and Jasper are stunned, but they pretend they have never met. Carson now finds herself employed inside the home of the man she slept with, taking care of his children and reporting to the wife he cheated on. Rather than resign, she stays. The arrangement becomes the center of the novel. Carson grows genuinely attached to Wyatt and Cam, and Jasper slowly allows himself back into her orbit. He initially keeps a rigid distance, but their emotional intimacy returns through shared meals, literary conversations, and books he secretly places in her bag, filled with annotations and personal messages. Carson begins eating dinner with Jasper and the boys almost every night while Camille travels for work, creating a counterfeit family life that becomes addictive to her. When Jasper and Carson finally sleep together again in his basement office, he becomes cold afterward, then later apologizes by arranging an elaborate rooftop evening. He admits he had tried to keep their relationship physically separate from his home because Carson is his much younger employee as well as his lover, but he has failed at his own rules. Instead of ending the affair, the two make it more elaborate.
The relationship also becomes financially compromising. After Carson admits how precarious her finances are, Jasper begins sending her substantial private payments in addition to her nanny salary, rationalizing the money as gifts or a way to “level the playing field.” He eventually sends her thousands of dollars and even encourages her to take an expensive gold cuff from Camille’s closet. Carson recognizes that accepting the money makes their already unequal relationship even more unequal, but she needs it and does not return it. Meanwhile, she develops a complicated connection with Arabelle, another young nanny she meets at school pickup. Arabelle is funny, independent, queer, somewhat chaotic, and one of the few people who seems able to see Carson without treating her primarily as a bereaved daughter or a project. Their friendship becomes flirtatious; they drink heavily together, sleep in the same bed after blackouts, kiss, and admit they are attracted to each other. Carson nevertheless remains emotionally consumed by Jasper. Nicole, meanwhile, becomes increasingly shut out. At a party she finally gets hold of Carson’s phone and discovers the affair. Carson has spent months withholding the truth because she knows Nicole will see how destructive the situation is. Camille’s returns home also become increasingly destabilizing. Carson resents her for reclaiming the family that was never Carson’s, yet she also becomes fascinated with her. Camille sometimes mothers Carson, tending her damaged hands and offering advice, and Carson learns that Camille once wanted to be a writer herself. She met Jasper when he was her teacher and thesis adviser, then supported him financially while his career took off. These details complicate Carson’s convenient fantasy that Camille is simply a shallow, controlling wife standing between two soulmates.
