Joy and Xander Disappear

Joy Moore and Benny Abbott are best friends and the hosts of the wildly successful comedy-survival podcast This Story Might Save Your Life. Their small team includes assistant producer Mallory and executive producer Xander Moore, Joy’s handsome, polished husband.

During a recording session disrupted by a power outage caused by the Santa Ana winds, Joy secretly slips a note into Benny’s pocket asking him to meet her later that night. When Benny goes to Joy and Xander’s house, however, Joy unexpectedly tells him to leave. Benny can tell something is wrong, and the encounter ends badly enough that he angrily threatens Xander before going home.

When Benny returns the following morning, the house is deserted. Leaves have blown everywhere, Joy and Xander are gone, and a bathroom window has been violently shattered. Xander’s prized 1964 MG is missing as well. After Benny and Mallory find Joy’s dog, Potsie, alone outside the gate, they realize something serious has happened and call the police.

The investigation is led by veteran Detective Keller and her younger partner, Detective Price. Benny explains that Joy has severe narcolepsy, which causes sleep attacks, sleep paralysis, and vivid hallucinations. Being alone could therefore be especially dangerous for her. He also reveals that Joy has been targeted for months by an anonymous stalker who photographs her and seems to know far too much about her movements.

The disappearance immediately attracts enormous attention because Joy and Benny are already public figures. Their podcast has also recently been embroiled in controversy after promoting Shake Awake, a protein shake that caused severe illness in dozens of consumers.

Convinced that Joy may have left behind something that can help him find her, Benny secretly takes her rose-gold laptop before police finish processing the house.

The Marriage Joy Was Hiding

Joy’s laptop contains pieces of a memoir she has secretly been writing, and it gradually reveals a very different version of her marriage from the one Benny thought he knew.

Joy first met Benny years earlier when he found her having a narcoleptic sleep attack on the floor of a club. Their strange introduction became a deep friendship, and they were nearly inseparable until Benny temporarily left for Colorado to settle his father’s estate.

While he was gone, Joy met Xander. Handsome, charming, and attentive, Xander quickly became an important part of her life. But after Joy suffered a traumatic miscarriage, her world began shrinking around him. Xander increasingly isolated her from Benny, and the two friends spent three years apart before eventually reconnecting and creating This Story Might Save Your Life together.

As Benny searches Joy’s computer for answers, his ex-wife Luna, a lawyer, arrives with information Joy had deliberately kept from him: Luna had been helping Joy prepare to divorce Xander.

Benny then discovers an encrypted folder labeled XYZ. He becomes convinced that Joy has hidden clues for him inside recent podcast episodes, trusting that their shared history will allow him to understand what she was trying to communicate. Eventually, he combines the titles of three podcast tracks to crack the password.

Inside is Joy’s full memoir.

The manuscript reveals that Xander had become increasingly controlling and abusive. He monitored Joy, installed a baby monitor to watch her, and physically restrained her during arguments. Joy had reached the point where she was secretly planning her escape, but she was terrified of what Xander might do if he discovered she intended to leave.

As reporters swarm around Benny and the disappearance becomes a national story, his sister Sarah, a therapist, comes to support him.

Xander Is Found Dead—and Benny Becomes a Suspect

The case takes a frightening turn when Xander’s 1964 MG is discovered crashed in the Angeles National Forest with Xander’s body nearby.

The crash initially looks like it might explain at least half of the disappearance, but the forensic evidence immediately raises questions. Xander suffered a serious brain bleed before the collision, meaning his fatal head injury occurred sometime before the car went off the road.

That does not automatically prove he was murdered, but it gives Detective Keller reason to investigate what happened to Xander before the crash—and Benny has already given her a compelling reason to look in his direction.

On the night Joy disappeared, Benny became furious with Xander and threatened to kill him. Unfortunately for Benny, the threat was recorded. With Xander dead, Joy still missing, and Benny clearly emotionally attached to her, police have both a possible motive and evidence of hostility between the two men.

Benny is arrested as Keller investigates the possibility that his confrontation with Xander went much further than he has admitted.

But Benny knows he didn’t kill Xander, and he remains far more concerned with finding Joy than clearing his own name.

Joy Is Alive

While everyone else wonders whether Joy is dead, kidnapped, or somehow connected to Xander’s death, she is actually hiding in a domestic violence shelter.

Her neighbor Carlotta, a retired judge who had recognized the signs of abuse in Joy’s marriage, helped arrange her escape. Joy believes that getting away from Xander is the only way to survive, but even inside the shelter she remains terrified that he may find her.

She is also dealing with another devastating discovery: she is eight weeks pregnant.

Joy had been taking birth control and never intended to become pregnant. She eventually realizes that Xander had secretly been replacing her pills with placebos. The pregnancy is the result of reproductive coercion, another way Xander attempted to control her and make leaving him more difficult.

Her severe narcolepsy makes her time at the shelter increasingly disorienting. Joy befriends a woman named Mitali, talking with her and believing Mitali is helping her navigate what is happening. Eventually, however, Joy discovers that Mitali left the shelter days earlier. Many of the conversations Joy thought she was having with her were hallucinations.

Then Joy begins bleeding.

She is suffering an incomplete miscarriage, and the hemorrhaging becomes life-threatening. Joy is rushed to the hospital, where doctors perform an emergency hysterectomy to save her life.

Benny Finally Finds Joy

Benny refuses to believe Joy vanished without leaving him some way to find her. His persistence pays off when he notices a secret message she has posted on the podcast’s public website.

His search also uncovers something disturbing inside their recording studio: a hidden surveillance camera. Someone has been secretly watching Joy there.

Following the trail she left behind, Benny, Sarah, and Luna eventually locate Joy after her medical emergency.

Joy is alive.

Her reappearance dramatically changes the investigation into Xander’s death. Joy gives Keller a simplified account of what happened on the night she fled: she and Xander had a violent domestic confrontation during which Xander struck his head, after which he left the house for a drive while Joy escaped and made her way to the shelter.

Her account is supported by Luna, Carlotta, and Carlotta’s partner Emil, a former Hollywood stuntman and personal trainer. Their stories align closely enough to provide investigators with a consistent explanation for the events leading up to Xander’s crash.

Police also uncover mounting evidence of Xander’s abusive and obsessive behavior toward Joy. Most damningly, they discover that the anonymous stalker who had terrorized her for months was connected to Xander himself.

With Joy safely accounted for, the witnesses giving consistent accounts, and the evidence supporting the idea that Xander suffered his head injury during the domestic confrontation before driving away, authorities ultimately rule Xander’s death an accident.

The case against Benny collapses, and the charges against him are dropped. Detective Keller closes the investigation, apparently satisfied that Xander’s death resulted from the chaotic events of that night.

What Keller—and Benny—doesn’t know is that almost everything about Xander’s final drive was fabricated.

What Really Happened That Night

The complete truth is saved for the novel’s final revelation.

Xander had not merely known about Joy’s mysterious stalker.

Xander was behind it.

He had orchestrated the campaign of harassment himself, hiring people to photograph Joy and sometimes taking the pictures personally. By making Joy believe an unknown person was constantly following her, he kept her frightened and increasingly dependent on him while concealing the fact that her own husband was the person monitoring her most closely.

Xander had also installed hidden cameras around the house and recording studio so he could secretly watch her.

On the night Joy disappeared, she finally confronted him about leaving their marriage. Xander became violent, and Joy fought back. During the struggle, she grabbed a heavy bronze Fonzie statue and struck him in the head.

The blow knocked Xander unconscious.

Joy had not been trying to kill him. She hit him while defending herself from his attack and then fled, following the plan Carlotta had already helped arrange to get her into a domestic violence shelter.

Luna arrived around the same time, while Carlotta and Emil heard the disturbance and became involved. At first, Xander was still alive. But the head injury Joy had inflicted caused the brain bleed that eventually killed him.

That left the others with an impossible decision. Joy had acted in self-defense, but proving that in the middle of a sensational case involving two famous podcasters could mean exposing every detail of her abuse and placing her at the center of a murder investigation.

So Carlotta, Emil, and Luna decided to make Xander’s death look accidental.

Emil’s background as a Hollywood stuntman made him particularly useful. They moved Xander and his MG to the Angeles National Forest and carefully staged the crash scene, creating skid marks and using a fire extinguisher to support the appearance of a collision-related fire. Back at the house, they smashed the bathroom window to muddy the circumstances of Joy’s disappearance and deleted the incriminating footage from Xander’s surveillance cameras.

Then they constructed the story Joy would later tell Detective Keller: Xander had injured his head during their domestic confrontation, driven away to cool off, and subsequently crashed.

Most importantly, they kept Benny completely out of the plan.

It isn’t because they don’t trust his loyalty. They know Benny would do anything for Joy. The problem is that Benny has a notoriously terrible “poker face.” If he knows they staged Xander’s death, he will have to convincingly lie to detectives. If he knows nothing, his confusion, anger, and desperation are completely genuine.

The strategy works almost too well: Benny actually becomes a suspect in Xander’s death because nobody has told him what really happened.

One Year Later

A year after Joy’s disappearance, the chaos has finally settled.

Xander’s death remains officially classified as an accident, and the charges against Benny are long gone. Joy and Benny have also finally crossed the line from lifelong best friends into a romantic relationship.

Together, they publish a successful joint memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You: A Tragicomic Story of Survival, telling the public version of what they endured.

They also reclaim Joy’s old “Zen Den,” transforming it into their full-time recording studio. The space that once existed inside the home where Xander secretly monitored Joy now belongs to Joy and Benny and the podcast they built together.

But Benny still doesn’t know every detail of what happened.

The surviving surveillance footage ultimately confirms the secret Joy, Luna, Carlotta, and Emil have protected: Joy struck Xander with the Fonzie statue in self-defense, and the others staged everything that happened afterward.

The world believes Xander Moore died in an accident.

Only a handful of people know why his car really ended up in that forest.