One by One

The unnamed narrator flashes back to a weekend when they were in college and drove home to visit their father. He isn’t home when they arrive, so they fall asleep in their room. Their father's return wakes them, and they hear him enter the house with a woman. He tries to convince the woman to stay over and eventually move in, but she refuses. They kiss, and the narrator sees that the woman is their Aunt Jeannette, their mother’s sister. The narrator is angry and confronts their father. Their father does not accept the blame for the narrator’s mother’s death, as he tells the narrator that they caused problems in their parents’ marriage, too.

The father tells the narrator they had to move after the narrator gouged out the eye of their classmate, Bryan, after he mocked them for “cooties.” The narrator also killed their mother’s beloved cat. The father admits he locked up the rifle and stopped teaching the narrator to shoot because he was scared the narrator would kill him. The father finally blames the narrator for their mother’s suicide, which hits close to home for the narrator as they ignored their dying mother to eat a sandwich.

The narrator is angered when their father tells them to leave and never come back. They push him, and he falls down the stairs and hits his head, dying in a pool of blood. The narrator decides to leave, as no one knows they are home, so their father’s death would likely appear to the police to be an accident.

Claire and Noah make love, then confess their love for each other. Claire is troubled by her affair with Jack and confesses to Noah, who admits that he knows about it already. He takes his half of the responsibility for their marriage souring and admits that he kissed another woman to get back at Claire. After he kissed her, he realized he only wanted Claire and wanted to fix their relationship. Even in college, Noah fantasized about being with Claire forever and growing old with her. He forgives her for her affair with Jack. Claire knows that she wants to be with Noah and work on their marriage and thinks everything will be okay.

Noah falls asleep quickly, but Claire cannot sleep. She slips out of bed and goes to clean her and Noah’s clothing, as they did not clean them before their intimacy. When she picks up Noah’s pants, a Swiss army knife falls out of the pocket. She becomes suspicious, as she didn’t know Noah had a knife on him and the cabin owner died of a stab wound. She convinces herself that Noah couldn’t have killed the cabin owner.

She puts the knife in the top drawer of the dresser by the Bible. She goes into the living room and offers to wash Jack’s clothes. He rejects her offer, but he tells her to scream if anything happens to her and promises to protect her.

Waking up in the cabin is strange for Claire, as she’s cuddled up with Noah for the first time in a while in a strange place. She gets up and checks the drawer, but the knife is gone. She’s instantly suspicious and goes to look for Jack. She can’t find him and shouts for Noah. He thinks Jack went for a walk, and when Claire checks the porch, she sees more blood. She becomes convinced Noah lied to her and planned the murders for revenge for her affair with Jack and begins to run.

She goes to the truck and finds Jack’s body with a bullet in the forehead. She hears an emotionless voice telling her to turn around, and when she turns, she sees Warner pointing a gun at her. She thinks Noah and Warner worked together to orchestrate the plot. Warner leads her back to the cabin and she sees someone else pointing a gun at Noah’s head.

The anonymous narrator is revealed to be Lindsay. When Lindsay first met Claire, she thought Claire was the most open and warm person she’d ever met. Claire loved Lindsay in a way her parents didn’t, so she never told Claire the truth about her troubled childhood.

Claire and Lindsay were very close in college, and Lindsay was enraged when Claire’s college boyfriend, Ted, cheated on her. She inadvertently ran into him over the summer and was the one who drowned him. She also later killed her friend Daphne’s cheating boyfriend in a hit-and-run. She’s killed other men since, but she believes that every man she’s killed has deserved it. Lindsay was also the woman that Noah kissed after she went over to the Matchett house to return a pair of Claire’s earrings. She was upset that Noah kissed her, and she became even more upset when she discovered Claire was cheating on Noah with Jack when she saw a flirty text from Jack on Claire’s phone. Lindsay felt betrayed, as she thought Claire was a good and loyal person. She decided then to orchestrate the deadly trip to the forest.

She met Warner in an online forum after he answered her question about which poisons don’t appear in autopsies. They had a brief sexual relationship, but Lindsay does not trust him. She reached out to him again, and he agreed to teach Claire, Noah, and Jack a lesson. They printed out a fake map and procured a knife capable of carving fake animal claw marks into trees.

Claire is shocked to see Lindsay holding a gun to Noah’s head. She’s initially thrilled to see Lindsay is alive, then horrified as she realizes Lindsay has had a role in the murders in the woods. Claire asks Lindsay why she’s doing this, and Lindsay lets Noah confess that the woman he kissed was Lindsay since he wanted to hurt Claire like she had hurt him by kissing her best friend. Noah claims that’s not the full truth, but Lindsay silences him. She expresses her disgust with Claire and Noah for their behavior and reveals she was the one who killed Ted. Claire feels sick at the revelation of her best friend’s depravity.

Lindsay also reveals her and Warner’s planned alibi: They will frame Noah for the murders because of his supposed jealousy over Claire and Jack’s affair. Claire feels despair over the thought of her children growing up without parents and thinking that their father was a murderer. She closes her eyes and hears a gunshot. She’s terrified that Lindsay has shot Noah, but when she opens her eyes, she sees that Lindsay shot Warner.

Lindsay says that Warner was a liability since the police have his fingerprints on file. She intends to frame Warner for the murders and claim that she played dead to survive. Claire tries to appeal to Lindsay, reminding her that she is not like her father and speaking of their friendship. Lindsay says that she was shocked that Claire stayed behind with her supposed corpse, as she didn’t think Claire cared. Lindsay admits she doesn’t want to kill Claire, but Claire now knows too much. Lindsay points the gun at Claire, and Claire closes her eyes.

She hears Lindsay scream and opens her eyes to see that Noah attacked her with the Swiss army knife. Claire grabs Lindsay’s gun and shakily holds it. Noah takes the gun and points it at Lindsay as she turns paler and paler, bleeding from the abdomen where Noah stabbed her. Noah turns Claire around, so she doesn’t have to see Lindsay bleed.

Emma hugs Claire tightly when they return home. Aidan and Noah hug, then the entire family, including Penny, hugs each other. Penny knew something was wrong the first night, but the authorities would not get involved until the group missed their reservation. The police arrived 10 minutes after Noah stabbed Lindsay, as Lindsay had placed an earlier call to claim Warner was threatening them with a gun to establish her alibi.

Warner’s real name was Donald Regis, and he was wanted in numerous states for other murders. Lindsay survived the stab wound and was arrested for the four murders: Jack, Michelle, Warner, and the cabin owner named Paul Duffy. Claire has complicated feelings about Lindsay, as she feels she let Lindsay down.

That night, Claire and Emma make a casserole for the family for dinner. Emma tells Claire that Noah said he planned to take a hike alone with Jack. This makes Claire suspicious, as Noah had said he would do anything to get Claire back. She goes through Noah’s bag and finds a magnet in one of his jacket pockets. She tries to convince herself that it’s there because Lindsay and Warner were planning to frame him, but she still feels unsettled about what he planned to do on the hike, especially since he also had the Swiss army knife. Claire decides not to ask, as she wants to keep their newfound happiness. Noah comes upstairs to help her with the laundry, promising to help out around the house more.

The narration switches back to Lindsay. Lindsay is in jail, looking at multiple life sentences, though her defense attorney says it may be possible to get her an “insanity” defense plea. However, the evidence from her other past murders is coming to light, so Lindsay thinks the plea is unlikely. She regrets turning her back on Noah and finds it ironic that he stabbed her with the knife she gave him, claiming she was nervous about having it while they were at the gas station on the way to the forest. Warner was the one to put the magnet in Noah’s jacket pocket. Lindsay thinks Claire will find the magnet and that it will eat away at her, eventually destroying her marriage.