Summary

Chapter One is a non-chronological collection of Margaret’s memories and actions that span from her courtship with her husband, Thomas, in the early 1990s to after she has sex with another man in 2017. Margaret is an academic with deep interest in religious texts due to her very religious upbringing.

The novel begins with Maggie and a man named James in Chicago in 2017. The man and woman know one another, and the man asks the taxi to drive them both to the same hotel—an advance Maggie takes as sexual. Readers are then quickly thrust back to 1993, where Maggie remembers her wedding day to a man named Thomas Ellmann. The two met in college and got married shortly after Maggie completed her coursework. Readers then find out that Maggie only married Thomas because she lost her virginity to him. It was...