The Flynn family is already barely holding together when twelve-year-old Harper Flynn walks into confession at Our Lady of Suffering Church and tells Father Andrew that her father may be planning to kill himself. Harper, an exceptionally intelligent and chronically bored child, mixes the warning in with admissions about stealing prescription pills, setting small fires, and slashing a church van tire, then claims she made everything up. But Father Andrew soon discovers the damaged tire and realizes Harper was telling at least some of the truth.

Her father, Bud Flynn, really is suicidal. An accounts and systems manager at Alabaster Harbor, Bud feels trapped in a life that has become financially precarious, emotionally empty, and humiliatingly ordinary. Sitting alone in the family minivan while high on stolen Trizoletin, he considers driving straight into the sea. His fifteen-year-old daughter Louise interrupts him to retrieve the car keys for her mother, inadvertently stopping him.

Much of Bud’s despair centers on his marriage to Catherine Flynn. They were once young bohemians who fell passionately in love after Catherine saw Bud playing in a band, but seventeen years of marriage and raising three daughters have left them deeply disconnected. Catherine abandoned her photography career and increasingly feels suffocated by domestic life. She eventually announced that she wanted an open marriage, an “arrangement” Bud never truly wanted but felt powerless to refuse.

Catherine is now sleeping with their wealthy neighbor Jim Doherty, a potter and pub owner whose money and expensive lifestyle make Bud feel even more inadequate. Their eldest daughter, seventeen-year-old Abigail, knows enough about the arrangement to resent her mother’s hypocrisy. When Catherine objects to Abigail dating an older man named Weston “Wes” Wyley, a former mercenary nicknamed “War Crimes Wes,” Abigail points out that Catherine is hardly in a position to lecture anyone about relationships.

Three Daughters Looking for Escape

While their parents’ marriage deteriorates, each Flynn daughter finds her own increasingly dangerous way of dealing with the family’s dysfunction.

Harper turns her attention to Bud’s workplace. While studying Alabaster Harbor’s records, she notices shipping containers repeatedly marked “REDACTED” despite physically arriving at the harbor. The discrepancies stretch back years. When she shows Bud, he dismisses her concerns and asks whether she would rather be right or happy. Harper backs off only after noticing a wilderness-camp brochure on his desk and realizing he might send her away.

Abigail seeks excitement with her friend Tibet. The girls sneak into a party at Alabaster Manor, the bizarre estate of tech billionaire Paul Alabaster, whose family dominates the harbor. There Abigail encounters Dr. Orson Lancaster III, known as Dolt, who attempts to slip something into her champagne. Wes, who works security at the manor, quietly warns her not to drink it. His intervention makes Abigail trust him and deepens her attraction to him.

Louise, the middle child, meanwhile, feels almost completely invisible within the family. Hoping to distinguish herself, she enters the church’s Spring Inner Beauty Pageant and chooses breath-holding as her talent. She remains underwater-deprived of air for more than three minutes before collapsing unconscious, yet still fails to make the finals.

Her humiliation drives her further toward an online confidant called “yourstruly,” whom she met in a chat room for middle children. Using religious and prophetic language, he convinces Louise that both her family and her faith have abandoned her. Eventually, he instructs her to gather materials for a homemade pressure-cooker bomb intended for the pageant.

Bud Finds Religion—and Another Affair

Bud’s increasingly erratic behavior at work alarms his boss, Allen, who orders him to attend Lost Lambs Christian Guidance so the harbor cannot be blamed if he commits suicide. The group is run by Priscilla Winkle, a deeply religious parishioner whose eleven-year-old daughter, Perry, has neurological damage and wears protective earmuffs during church services.

During one Lost Lambs meeting, Bud publicly admits that Catherine is sleeping with Jim. After another terrible fight at home, he drunkenly visits Priscilla. Lonely after twelve years without her husband, Priscilla comforts him, and their relationship quickly becomes physical. Bud sees the affair as something miraculous rather than recognizing that he is now doing essentially what he resents Catherine for doing.

Harper accidentally discovers the secret through Perry. During one of Harper’s eccentric protests in Termite Square, Perry casually reveals that Bud visits her mother at night. Soon afterward, Bud follows through on his threat and sends Harper to Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat. Exhausting labor, sleep deprivation, and getting her first period while away temporarily crush Harper’s rebellious streak.

When she returns, however, Bud finally investigates the harbor records himself. He finds the same decade-long pattern of redacted cargo Harper discovered. Allen tells him to forget about it, reminding Bud that his generous union compensation is partly dependent on knowing when not to ask questions. But Bud’s recent religious awakening has made him unusually determined to do the right thing.

That determination attracts the attention of Paul Alabaster.

The Secrets Behind Alabaster Harbor

Bud is taken by private car to Alabaster Manor, where Paul Alabaster makes it clear just how powerful he is. Alabaster openly discusses using his technology to manipulate people’s thinking, offers Bud an enormous check for his silence, and casually mentions Bud’s daughters by name. He even knows about Harper’s investigation. Bud understands that the money is both a bribe and a threat.

At the same time, Catherine’s fantasy about Jim collapses spectacularly. Before a planned romantic weekend, Jim proudly shows her a basement filled with dozens of crude ceramic vaginas representing his former lovers and wives. Horrified, Catherine leaves. While shopping afterward, she overhears church gossip revealing that Bud is sleeping with Priscilla.

Rather than returning home, Catherine checks into the luxurious LuxWing hotel, dyes her hair brassy blond, and charges the entire rebellion to Jim’s account.

When Bud and Catherine finally confront each other, their anger explodes. Bud punches a wall, and Catherine cools his injured hand with a frozen martini glass. Their confrontation turns into a desperate physical encounter that does nothing to repair their marriage. Afterward, Catherine simply tells him they should call the arrangement—and effectively their old relationship—off.

Elsewhere, Wes is uncovering something much worse. After being fired from Alabaster Manor, he works with a private investigator who obtains an old photograph showing Alabaster, Dolt, and a masked third man surrounding an unconscious girl tied to a chair. The third man is Father Andrew. Years earlier, Andrew committed a fatal hit-and-run, giving Alabaster the leverage to blackmail him into cooperation.

Wes and the investigator also locate a hidden shipping container at the harbor. Finger scratches gouged into its interior prove that human beings have been imprisoned inside.

Harper’s redacted containers were never a bookkeeping error. Alabaster has been trafficking girls.

Louise’s Bomb and Abigail’s Disappearance

Bud briefly tries to escape the family’s chaos by taking his daughters on a trip to visit his father, Mr. Flynn, a retired police officer. They never make it.

Airport security stops Louise because “yourstruly” has reported her activities to authorities, placing her on the federal no-fly list. Back home, Bud discovers the bomb-making materials hidden in the treehouse. Louise finally breaks down and admits she never truly wanted to kill anyone. She wanted someone to notice her.

As Louise faces house arrest and the bomb squad dismantles her materials, Catherine begins rebuilding her own life. She hires an attractive contractor named Remy to renovate the downstairs bathroom, and the two become romantically involved. Remy helps Catherine reconsider her belief that abandoning art made her life meaningless, suggesting that raising her daughters may itself have been her most important creation.

Meanwhile, Tibet becomes alarmed when Abigail receives a formal, hand-addressed invitation to a party at Alabaster Manor. The invitation is written in rare Leviathan calligraphy, and Tibet’s investigation only makes the situation more suspicious: she discovers that Abigail is the only female guest on the list and uncovers disturbing online claims about Paul Alabaster’s obsession with parabiosis—the experimental sharing of blood between young and old organisms. She begs Abigail not to go.

Abigail goes anyway, partly because she believes Wes will be working security at the party. Ever since she confessed that she loves him, Wes has become distant and strangely quiet, and Abigail is desperate to provoke some kind of reaction from him. She buys a striking new dress and imagines that showing up and misbehaving at the estate will finally force Wes to pay attention to her. What she doesn’t know is that Wes has already been fired from Alabaster’s security detail and has kept it from her.

The invitation also appeals to something deeper in Abigail. She looks at Catherine, whose youthful ambitions disappeared into marriage, children, and suburban life, and is terrified of ending up the same way. Abigail imagines adulthood as something glamorous and expansive, filled with travel, romance, mystery, and invitations to places like Alabaster Manor. To her, attending the party feels like stepping toward that future rather than repeating her mother’s life. Convinced Tibet is overreacting, she nevertheless slips a Taser into her pocket and takes her bicycle onto the bus for the trip up the canyon to the manor.

Once there, however, Abigail asks for Wes and learns that he was fired the previous week. Suddenly alone in a house filled almost entirely with men, she realizes the invitation was never the glamorous opportunity she imagined. She tries to leave, but Alabaster draws her into conversation and gives her a cocktail containing an ice cube with a preserved crocodile embryo. The substance gradually paralyzes her, leaving Abigail conscious but unable to move as Alabaster and Dolt prepare to harvest her blood for their grotesque youth ritual.

The Girls Inside Alabaster Manor

When Tibet realizes Abigail is in serious danger, she contacts Harper and Louise. The sisters break into Abigail’s diary and trace her connection to Wes. They find him living with his one-armed roommate Marshall, and the group heads for Alabaster Manor armed for a rescue.

Inside, Harper and Louise encounter a masked Father Andrew, who warns them to leave. They then discover the true scale of Alabaster’s operation. Around fifty masked men are gathered in the manor’s atrium, chanting in Latin and drinking blood from ceremonial chalices.

Marshall shoots open the locked doors to Alabaster’s study, setting off an alarm. The group forces open the closet and finds Abigail alive but paralyzed.

She isn’t alone.

Hidden inside the manor are approximately twenty kidnapped and severely dehydrated Albanian girls—the human cargo transported through Alabaster Harbor’s redacted containers. Wes, Marshall, Harper, and Louise get Abigail and the trafficking victims out of the manor and back to the Flynn house.

Bud comes home to the surreal sight of his house filled with rescued girls eating pizza, along with Wes, Marshall, and his drugged eldest daughter. He also realizes with disgust that the money he accepted from Alabaster paid for things around the house, including new possessions for his children. What looked like salvation was literally blood money.

Catherine immediately takes control of the emergency and calls the police.

The Flynns Build a Different Family

Bud drives to Alabaster Manor, but Alabaster and his associates are already gone. A ringing rotary phone connects him to Alabaster, who mocks Bud’s threats and confidently insists that his family’s power over the harbor will protect him. Bud can do little except steal a Boy Crying painting from the foyer before the police arrive.

Paul Alabaster, Dolt, and Father Andrew ultimately flee the country and disappear. The kidnapped Albanian girls are either reunited with their families or temporarily taken in by members of the community.

The Flynn family does not return to its old form, but each member begins constructing something healthier from the wreckage. Catherine remains committed to parenting her daughters while continuing her relationship with Remy. Abigail comes to understand that Catherine’s decision to stay present for her children has value even if it isn’t the artistic life Catherine once imagined.

Abigail’s relationship with Wes also survives. At the Sisters of Sorrow Summer Dance, she slow-dances with him as he wears his first suit, finally experiencing the kind of genuine intimacy she had been trying to find through dangerous adult relationships.

Louise struggles with the collapse of everything “yourstruly” convinced her to believe. During mandated community service at a Jewish home for the aging, she begins reading the Torah and meets Caleb, a boy from the neighboring brother school. With some encouragement from Caleb’s grandmother, Bubbe, the two begin dating.

Bud also confronts Jim, dryly informing him that he knows about the basement full of ceramic vaginas. His relationship with Priscilla continues to place her within the Flynns’ strange new orbit rather than restoring his marriage to Catherine.

The novel ends at Lucky Penne, where everyone gathers for Harper’s birthday. The table now includes Catherine and Remy, Bud and Priscilla, Louise and Caleb, and the Flynn daughters. Nearby, Jim eats with his son Myles while complaining about the Flynns and their supposed moral failings.

Myles, however, cannot stop watching them.

For all their dysfunction, the Flynns are laughing together. Their family has fractured, expanded, and rearranged itself, but the people at the table genuinely seem to enjoy one another. When they notice the lonely Myles watching, they invite him to join them.

The story closes with the enlarged, unconventional Flynn family sharing food and laughter as the setting sun pours through the restaurant’s stained glass.