The Plot

The next morning, Jake arrives at the UGA campus, and finds records for Rose Parker. She was only on campus for one year. He then heads to her lawyer’s office.

The lawyer cites client-attorney privilege and refuses to answer any of Jake’s questions. (It is later revealed that Anna threatened him in order to keep him from talking.) Jake taunts the lawyer, taking an offensive stance and feeling like he’s channeling Talented Tom.

Next, Jake visits the off-campus address listed in Rose’s student file. He talks to the rental agent, claiming to be looking for an apartment for his college-aged daughter. There’s a brief discussion about gentrification, and eventually Jake asks about Rose, who he claims is his cousin’s daughter. The agent does not remember Rose, but thinks the housekeeper might.

The housekeeper remembers Rose as a mature student whose mother died in a tent in Georgia. However, when Jake shows the housekeeper the picture of Rose he found at the library, the housekeeper thinks the picture is of someone else.

The excerpt from Crib that follows describes Samantha covering up her murder of Maria by visiting their hometown and giving people fake updates about Maria’s college experience and telling Maria’s ex-girlfriend that Maria is seeing someone new. Samantha claims to be selling their old house to be closer to her daughter while she’s in school. Eventually, she leaves town and returns to Maria’s life.

Jake calls Anna with an update: He’s headed to Foxfire, the campground where Rose’s mom supposedly died. Jake found the location in a newspaper article that lists Rose as losing a sister, not a mother, in a fire. Anna argues, asking Jake to stop his investigation. Jake refuses to stop digging.

Jake asks some locals for directions to Foxfire. The guys in the shop he stops at remember the Parker sisters, and one of them, Mike, drives Jake to the campground. Mikes says a propane heater that fell over on a tent sparked the fire and agrees to connect Jake with the coroner.

Jake checks into a hotel without contacting Anna, and goes to dinner with Mike and the coroner. The latter tells Jake that the victim’s sister identified the destroyed body. Seeing Rose’s supposed distress and poverty, citizens of the town offered to help pay for the burial. When Jake questions this version of events, the coroner tries to convince Jake that the fire was an accident. Jake pulls out the picture of Rose, saying she’s the one who died. The coroner says Jake is disgusting for suggesting that the crazy plot twist from his novel Crib could ever have happened in real life.

As Jake pays for dinner, he decides his investigation is not worth it after all. He goes to the cemetery where he looks at the grave of Rose’s supposed sister. Then, he sends a picture of the grave to Anna, adding Rose’s name. As a kind of atonement, Jake considers writing a non-fiction meta version of his novel.

The Crib excerpt in this chapter finds Samantha still doing her old medical billing job at night, but taking classes under Maria’s name during the day; she is finally living her dream. However, this dream is disturbed when Maria’s ex-girlfriend, Gab, comes to Samantha’s Ohio apartment to ask about Maria. Samantha offers to buy pizza and secretly adds peanuts to the pizza, which kill the severely allergic Gab.    

When Jake returns to New York, Anna is not at their apartment. However, she left soup and wine for Jake. Jake also finds another message from Tom. He replies for the first time, revealing his theory about Rose to his stalker. When Anna returns with fresh bread from the store, Jake starts to tell her about his trip.

As Jake is talking, he feels woozy. He claims to empathize with his character Samantha, babbling about the murder being an understandable crime of passion in a heated moment. Anna says the soup recipe was from her real mom, and that the childhood story she told him came from Housekeeping. Jake, drugged, slowly realizes she’s angry.

As the drugs in the soup overwhelm Jake, Anna explains that his desire for answers forced her to speed up her plan. She force-feeds Jake pills, telling him about her parents forcing her to carry out her pregnancy.

Anna confesses she removed the carbon monoxide alarm battery to kill her parents and caused Evan’s overdose. Then, she complains that her daughter Rose was terrible, and her murder was not in the heat of the moment, as Jake’s novel imagined—it was premeditated. When Evan tried to find Rose, he found Anna instead. When she learned that he wrote about 200 pages of his novel, Anna destroyed them.

As Anna talks, she deletes anything on Jake’s phone that might reveal her identity as Dianna Parker and adds a fake suicide note. Anna explains that she gave Jake Vicodin, Gabapentin, and Valium. She laughs that she had even taunted him to realize who she was, leaving her mom’s cookbook with the Parker name written in it on their kitchen counter. However, the self-involved Jake never noticed, always missing the important details. Jake barely understands her as the drugs slowly kill him.

Continuing her life story, Anna tells Jake that she leveraged her affair with Randy from the Seattle radio station into getting Jake on the radio show when she heard about his famous book. Once Anna leaves, their cat stays with Jake until he dies.

Candy, the Seattle interviewer who talked to Jake 18 months ago, interviews Anna about Lapse, Jake’s posthumous novel. Anna lies about their love and describes the online attacks by Talented Tom that led to Jake’s suicide. In the end, Anna says she wants to be a writer, and she repeats platitudes about writing that occur through the novel.