Naomi’s Perfect Marriage Suddenly Ends

The Divorce is told through shifting first-person perspectives and a deliberately misleading timeline. Parts I and II are narrated by Naomi Roth, a 42-year-old former doctor who gave up her career to raise her son. Part III suddenly jumps back six years and switches to Veronica Chesson, revealing an entirely different side of the story. Part IV brings Naomi and Veronica together during the climax, while the epilogue switches to Jeremy Roth and reveals the final—and darkest—layer of the plot.

When the story begins, Naomi believes she has built a wonderful life with Jeremy, her wealthy 40-year-old hedge fund manager husband, and their five-year-old son, Teddy Roth. Teddy is about to turn six and is obsessed with collecting rocks. Naomi has devoted herself to being his mother and has no idea that her family is about to collapse.

One day, Naomi returns home with Teddy and discovers that her garage opener and house keys no longer work. Jeremy claims he’s surprising her with a renovation and has already packed several suitcases for her. He sends Naomi to stay temporarily in his late mother’s dusty apartment.

The renovation is a lie. Once Naomi is settled there, Jeremy announces that he wants a divorce.

He has already prepared for war. Naomi’s credit cards are frozen, their joint checking account has been reduced to $25, and Jeremy insists that because he earned the family’s money, it belongs to him. He also wants Teddy living primarily with him.

Then Naomi discovers why Jeremy suddenly wants out. She drives to their house at night and catches him kissing Veronica Chesson, a stunning 28-year-old woman. Jeremy openly admits that he’s in love with Veronica.

Jeremy Turns the Divorce Into a Custody War

Naomi tries to hire highly regarded divorce attorney Stefanie Gorman, only to discover that Jeremy anticipated this too. He paid retainers to the area’s best divorce attorneys so they would have conflicts of interest and couldn’t represent Naomi. Stefanie quietly directs her to her ex-husband, Ezra Fletcher, an eccentric but capable attorney whose chaotic office makes him initially seem like a questionable choice.

Jeremy’s aggressive lawyer, Leonard “Lenny” Hardwick, begins building a case that Naomi is an unreliable mother. During mediation with Alana Ocasio, Jeremy emphasizes incidents when Naomi supposedly forgot appointments or failed to pick up Teddy. He wants primary custody, which would also help him avoid paying child support.

At the same time, unsettling things begin happening inside Naomi’s apartment. Her door is mysteriously left open. Dirty dishes appear. A kitchen knife disappears. Then Teddy’s beloved stuffed elephant, Ellie, turns up hidden in a dresser drawer, viciously cut apart with a knife and covered in red liquid. Jeremy immediately treats the incident as evidence that Naomi is unstable enough to destroy her own son’s toy.

Things become even more frightening when Naomi drinks her homemade kombucha and becomes violently ill. She realizes crushed Tylenol has been added to it and begins to suspect that Veronica has been sneaking into the apartment, either trying to poison her or make her death look like suicide.

Naomi’s friend Cora Janzen, a recently divorced mother from Teddy’s school, helps her investigate Veronica. They trace Veronica to the wealthy Maxim and Rhona Simington, for whom she previously worked as a live-in housekeeper. Naomi learns that Veronica was once addicted to heroin and was accused of trying to seduce Maxim and pushing Rhona down the stairs. Ezra obtains Veronica’s drug arrest record and uses it against Jeremy during the custody proceedings.

For the first time, Naomi seems to have something she can use against him.

Naomi Loses Control

Jeremy and Veronica throw Teddy an extravagant sixth birthday party, complete with a bouncy castle and pony, while deliberately excluding Naomi. Unable to tolerate missing her son’s birthday, Naomi shows up anyway.

After a toy robot car is smashed, Jeremy accuses Naomi of causing trouble and calls the police. Naomi becomes frantic during the confrontation and accidentally jostles an officer. She is arrested for trespassing and ends up with a temporary order of protection forbidding her from approaching Teddy or the family home.

Losing access to Teddy pushes Naomi past her breaking point.

When Jeremy leaves for a business trip to Boston, Naomi goes to the house claiming she only wants to deliver a rock for Teddy. Veronica refuses to let her see him and attempts to call Jeremy. Panicking, Naomi grabs a heavy rock and strikes Veronica over the head, knocking her unconscious.

Instead of getting help, Naomi ties Veronica’s wrists and ankles with duct tape and drags her into the refrigerated wine cellar. She then uses boning shears to cut off Veronica’s hair.

While searching Veronica’s phone, Naomi makes another discovery: Veronica is pregnant.

But Veronica has a much bigger secret.

Veronica Reveals Who Teddy Really Is

Part III jumps back six years and switches to Veronica’s perspective.

At the time, Veronica was involved with Clay Barkley, a former medical student whose life had been derailed by heroin addiction after a skiing injury. Veronica gave birth at home to their son, Dominic.

When Dominic was only two weeks old, Clay took him out in the car. At a rest stop, Clay used heroin and passed out. When he woke up, Dominic and his car seat were gone. Because Clay was an addict, the police did not take his account seriously enough to find the missing infant. Clay later died from what appeared to be another heroin overdose.

For years, Veronica had no idea what happened to her baby.

Then her best friend, Lola, who worked in the St. Louis town hall records department, discovered something extraordinary. A fraudulent birth certificate had been created shortly after Dominic vanished. The document had been arranged through Lorraine Paxson, Naomi’s mother, and named Naomi and Jeremy as the baby’s parents.

Veronica eventually tracks down Jeremy on Long Island. Rather than immediately confronting him, she begins running with him in the park and becomes romantically involved with him. She also secretly swabs Teddy’s cheek and submits the sample for DNA testing.

On the day of Teddy’s sixth birthday party, the results arrive.

Teddy is Veronica’s biological son with 99.9999998 percent certainty.

Teddy is Dominic.

Back in the wine cellar, Veronica tells Naomi that she knows the truth. Naomi can no longer hide what she did six years earlier.

She had found Clay unconscious from heroin inside the car while baby Dominic cried nearby. Instead of calling the authorities, Naomi simply took the baby. She brought him home and enlisted Lorraine to help create a false birth certificate naming Naomi and Jeremy as his parents. Dominic became Teddy, and Naomi raised another woman’s stolen child as her own.

The Wine Cellar Goes Up in Flames

Ezra eventually comes to the Roth house looking for Naomi. He hears Veronica screaming from the cellar and realizes something is terribly wrong.

When Ezra tries to go downstairs, Naomi panics and pushes him down the steep staircase. He crashes to the bottom, suffering severe head injuries and a broken leg.

Now Naomi has Veronica tied up and Ezra badly injured. Convinced there is no possible way to explain what she’s done, she decides to destroy the evidence.

She smashes bottles of high-proof scotch across the cellar floor and sets the alcohol on fire.

But Ezra isn’t dead. He regains consciousness and manages to strike Naomi over the head with a heavy magnum wine bottle. He frees Veronica and tells her to get Teddy out of the burning house while he remains behind.

Veronica races upstairs, but Teddy has been trained not to leave his locked bedroom with strangers unless they know secret family safety phrases. With smoke spreading through the hallway, she desperately works to gain his trust. Eventually, she gets him through the bedroom window and onto the slanted roof, where they wait for firefighters.

Veronica and Teddy are rescued.

Naomi and Ezra both die in the cellar fire.

Jeremy rushes back from the airport and tearfully embraces Teddy and Veronica. Veronica knows she must eventually explain that Teddy is really Dominic, but she intends to reassure Jeremy that biology doesn’t erase the fact that he has always been Teddy’s father.

What Veronica doesn’t know is that Jeremy already knows.

Jeremy Was Behind Everything

The epilogue switches to Jeremy’s perspective and completely reframes the divorce.

Four years earlier, Clay hadn’t simply disappeared from Teddy’s life. He had tracked Jeremy down after finding a crystal bearing Naomi’s business logo beneath his car mat. Clay told Jeremy that Naomi had stolen his baby and demanded his son back.

Jeremy secretly had Teddy’s DNA tested and confirmed the truth: Teddy was not biologically his child.

But Jeremy loved Teddy and had no intention of surrendering him to Clay.

So Jeremy arranged Clay’s death.

Clay’s supposedly accidental heroin overdose was actually a murder engineered by Jeremy to ensure Teddy could never be taken away.

The divorce itself was another carefully planned operation. Jeremy wanted Naomi out of Teddy’s life and deliberately manufactured evidence that she was an unstable and neglectful mother. He gave Naomi incorrect appointment times verbally so she would appear forgetful. He hired longtime nanny Rosita partly to create documentation of Naomi’s supposed failures.

The terrifying incidents in Naomi’s apartment weren’t Veronica’s work either.

Jeremy was the person secretly entering the apartment. He mutilated Teddy’s stuffed elephant and staged it with the missing knife so Naomi would look disturbed. He crushed Tylenol into Naomi’s kombucha. His ultimate plan was to win primary custody and then kill Naomi with an overdose of sleeping pills, making her death appear to be a suicide.

Naomi’s own increasingly violent behavior ultimately accomplishes Jeremy’s goal without him having to finish the job himself.

By the end, Clay is dead, Naomi is dead, and Teddy’s biological mother has fallen in love with Jeremy. Veronica is pregnant with Jeremy’s child, giving him the new family he wanted while allowing him to keep the boy he considers his son.

Jeremy ends the story satisfied that Teddy is finally safe with him. Teddy may not share his DNA, but that has never mattered to Jeremy.

What matters is that Teddy belongs to him—and Jeremy is willing to kill anyone who ever tries to take his son away.