Verity

Lowen Ashleigh is a financially struggling author still reeling from her mother's recent death when she witnesses a man being killed in a traffic accident in Manhattan. Covered in blood and badly shaken, she is helped by a stranger, Jeremy Crawford, who brings her into a restroom, gives her his shirt, and briefly shares his own grief: five months earlier, he pulled his daughter Harper's body from a lake. Lowen then goes to a secret meeting at Pantem Press with her agent and former lover, Corey, only to discover that Jeremy is there because the offer concerns his wife, bestselling novelist Verity Crawford.

Pantem wants Lowen to complete the last three books in Verity's successful series because Verity can no longer write after a severe car accident. Lowen first refuses, especially when the publisher expects publicity work, but Jeremy privately tells her Verity admired Lowen's writing and urges her to negotiate for far more money, anonymity, and time to work from Verity's home in Vermont. With debts mounting and eviction looming, Lowen accepts. Corey worries that too much tragedy surrounds the Crawford family: one twin daughter, Chastin, died from an allergic reaction, Harper later drowned, and then Verity crashed into a tree. Lowen dismisses his suspicion and goes anyway.

At the Crawford house, Lowen finds an isolated, uneasy home. Jeremy is kind but burdened, their five-year-old son Crew is strange and watchful, and Verity's condition is far worse than the public has been told. She lies in bed apparently vacant and unresponsive, cared for by nurses including April. While digging through Verity's chaotic office for outlines, Lowen instead finds a hidden manuscript called So Be It, an autobiographical confession. Against her better judgment, she begins reading. The manuscript presents Verity as obsessively attached to Jeremy, resentful of pregnancy, jealous of her daughters, and increasingly violent. In it, Verity describes trying to harm her unborn twins, neglecting them as infants, favoring Chastin over Harper, attempting to kill Harper in the nursery, and manipulating Jeremy whenever he notices something is wrong.

As Lowen reads, life in the house becomes more disturbing. She repeatedly thinks Verity is watching her. Crew says things that suggest his mother has spoken to him, and strange details do not add up: a television is turned off after a nurse says she left it on, a knife disappears from Verity's room, curtains shift, and Lowen is certain she catches Verity staring directly at her. Lowen's own instability complicates everything, because she has a history of dangerous sleepwalking, once waking injured with no memory of what she had done. After she sleepwalks into Verity's bed, Jeremy comforts rather than rejects her, and their emotional bond deepens.

Meanwhile, the manuscript grows more horrifying. Verity claims she came to believe Harper killed Chastin during the sleepover where Chastin died from peanut exposure. Later, according to the manuscript, Verity deliberately takes Harper and Crew out in a canoe, tips it over, saves Crew, and lets Harper drown, staging the aftermath as a tragic accident. In the manuscript's final section, Verity says Jeremy began suspecting the truth after hearing from Crew that Verity had told him to hold his breath before the canoe overturned. She ends by writing that if Jeremy exposes her, she will kill herself by driving into a tree. For Lowen, the manuscript explains both the children's deaths and the later crash, and it confirms her belief that Verity is monstrously dangerous.

At the same time, Lowen and Jeremy grow steadily closer. They talk late into the night about grief, marriage, therapy, and their losses. Jeremy admits that he, not Verity, was the one who loved Lowen's novel and recommended her for the job. Their attraction eventually becomes physical: after a near-miss interrupted by Crew, Jeremy kisses Lowen on the night of her birthday. In the middle of that encounter, Lowen looks up and sees Verity standing at the top of the stairs, watching them. Jeremy searches, but Verity is back in bed by the time he gets upstairs. Though he first blames stress and guilt, he later installs a lock on Verity's bedroom door at night, suggesting he is at least partly unsettled too.

Lowen and Jeremy begin an affair. She urges him to place Verity in a care facility, and he eventually arranges for weekday nursing-home care. Yet Verity's behavior continues to escalate. Lowen believes Verity locks her bedroom door from the outside while Jeremy is in bed with her. Crew repeats that his mother told him not to answer questions about her. After Crew injures his gums and Jeremy takes him for stitches, Lowen is left alone in the house and sets up a baby monitor to watch Verity. She finishes the manuscript just before Jeremy returns.

Soon after, Lowen sees Verity crawling on her hands and knees before scrambling back into bed. In panic and fury, Lowen tries to drag Verity out where Jeremy can see the truth, but he walks in mid-struggle and thinks Lowen is attacking his helpless wife. He orders Lowen to leave. Desperate, Lowen gives him the manuscript and begs him to read it. After doing so, Jeremy confronts Verity in her room. When he threatens to take the pages to the police, Verity opens her eyes and speaks, confirming that she has been conscious and has been faking her condition. Enraged by both the deception and what the manuscript says about Harper, Jeremy attacks her. Lowen stops him from openly strangling her, fearing he will be exposed and Crew will lose his father, but she then helps him stage Verity's death as an accident by making it appear Verity aspirated in her sleep.

After Verity dies, Lowen and Jeremy present her death as natural. Later, however, Lowen finds a hidden letter from Verity addressed to Jeremy. In it, Verity claims the manuscript was never a confession at all but an "antagonistic journaling" exercise suggested by her editor Amanda Thomas, a way of rewriting real events with sinister invented thoughts. She says Harper's drowning was accidental, that Jeremy found the pages after the death and tried to kill her by staging the very car crash that incapacitated her, and that she only pretended to remain helpless because she believed Jeremy would finish the job if he knew she had recovered. She also says she planned to escape with Crew once she had enough money. The letter radically undermines everything Lowen thought she knew.

Faced with the possibility that she helped Jeremy murder an innocent woman, Lowen panics. She also realizes Jeremy may have known more about the manuscript than he ever admitted. Yet she cannot prove whether Verity's letter is the truth or one final manipulation. Pregnant and unable to bear the damage the letter could do, Lowen destroys it completely and tells Jeremy nothing. The novel ends with Jeremy, Lowen, and Crew moving forward together while Verity's true guilt or innocence remains permanently unresolved.