When Lauren arrives home, quite drunk, from her best friend Eleni’s hen do, she is surprised and alarmed to find a man in her house. What’s more, the man says he is her husband, and there is evidence everywhere to suggest he is right: there are photos of them together around the flat and on her phone, he has a key (which she discovers when she tries to throw him out), they have a long string of text messages involving quotidian things like picking up milk on the way home. She decides to sleep it off in the spare room and sort out this husband situation in the morning.
The husband, the first one, is called Michael. He does appear to be her husband – which Lauren now confirms with her sister Nat, her beloved toddler nephew Caleb and numerous other sources. She googles him and finds out that he’s an architect (not bad) and, though there are subtle changes around the house like new cushions and a different rug, she still has her job at the council and most other aspects of her life are in place. Just as she is getting used to the idea that she is now married and sharing her life with a stranger, Michael goes up into the attic to change a lightbulb. An entirely different man comes down.
Very soon, Lauren is tapping into an apparently endless supply of husbands – when one goes up to the attic, another comes down. Sometimes the paint on the walls is different or there are other little touches, hints of a shared life, but as far as the husbands are concerned, Lauren has no idea what to expect. One husband comes down cursing and violent. Lauren is scared. Sending him back is more difficult, but she tricks him into it. Several more husbands follow. One she keeps around for a while, Jason, is a gardener and her garden has never looked so good. But eventually he doesn’t seem right, and she sends him back.
While getting to know this string of husbands, Lauren is also experimenting – what changes from husband to husband, how close she is to her friends, what her bank account balance is. She also experiments with the attic itself, finding that when she herself climbs the ladder, and electrical current grows at an alarming pace. The changes are a little disorienting – sometimes there are new close friends, or she herself is in a different job, and she has to navigate the problems of assimilating into her life. But if anything goes terribly wrong or she is a bit reckless, she can just reset with a new husband.
Then, Carter comes down the attic stairs and is wonderful. He’s American, he had stayed in the UK for her. He’s perfect – they have great chemistry, her friends seem to love him, he is kind and thoughtful. He gives Lauren butterflies, and makes her wish she had memories of their wedding. In this sprit she tries to find their wedding photos, and before she knows what is happening, Carter has ascended the attic to look for them. A new husband comes down. Lauren is heartbroken.
She cycles quickly through several more. She goes to the park, not able to face any new husbands, but she soon gets a call from the new husband, Felix. She discovers that in this timeline she rents her flat on Airbnb and her real home is a mansion in the countryside. Lauren decides to stick around with Felix for a while – a week’s vacation in wealth. She learns some not-nice things about the company Felix works for, but he himself is nice, if a bit absent. She doesn’t have a job. Occasionally she has to look after Felix’s pre-teen son from a previous marriage who likes to shoot squirrels with his air rifle, which unnerves Lauren. Jason, one of her previous husbands, is their gardener, which sends Lauren on another research mission – finding out that all of her previous husbands, or at least the ones she bothered to learn the names of, are living their different lives. She stalks Carter on social media; he is back in the States and seemingly in a good relationship.
After a week, in the country mansion, it is time to go. But it getting Felix back into the attic is harder than she expected. She has to make a scene. She goes to the flat and refuses to leave until he gets there – he involves his company interns and a neighbour before he comes himself. She does persuade him to go up, but it is difficult. Dozens of husbands follow. Eventually a husband descends the stairs and they pass a decent few hours together hanging around, until the husband makes a flimsy excuse to head back up to the attic. The penny drops – this husband knows the attic will remove him!
Lauren and Bohai are delighted to find each other. Exactly the opposite thing is happening to him – he going into a wardrobe or an attic or a pantry and comes out every time in a different place. He has husbands and wives. He memorises Lauren’s phone number before he goes back up (hers is always the same) and texts her a few minutes later from Australia. For the rest of the novel they are friends and confidants.
Husband two hundred is Amos, who is in fact Lauren’s ex-boyfriend. There’s already a lot of baggage between them, so it is no surprise they are divorcing in this timeline. Lauren decides to stick with it and enjoy being single again for a while – things are a little different, but this is the most like her old life. She goes on real live dates using apps. She finds herself wandering out to the country house she shared with Felix. All the door codes are the same as the timeline they were together. She has a look around. The stepson comes home and gets his air rifle, while Lauren sneaks outside to hide in the grass.
Still enjoying her “normal” life, Lauren realises that Carter is single in the States, and an estate agent, so she flies to Colorado and arranges a meeting with him to view properties. She stalks him for three days before he asks her, in the politest possible way, to leave him alone. She returns home, desperate to erase her humiliation with a reset, but first she has to persuade Amos to go back to the attic. But their separation is a bitter one – he does not want to meet her at home. And he’s about to move to New Zealand. She meets Amos for coffee near the flat and drugs him. Sure enough, when he starts to feel woozy, she suggest they go back to the flat. Even though he is losing consciousness, she desperately manages to persuade him to go up.
More husbands. The anniversary of the first husband appearing is coming up. She sends them all back, until, as the new feet come down the rungs, the husband slips and lands hard on the floor, breaking his back. Lauren is stuck with this new husband, whose name it turns out is Zach Ephron (no relation). She nurses him through months of recovery, impatient to send him back. But even when he is fully recovered, he is in no mood to go back to the attic. As Lauren gets increasingly desperate, she goes back
to the Felix house and retrieves the stepson’s air rifle. At gunpoint, she tries to get Zach back into the attic. A neighbour, stopping by to drop something off, walks in on the scene and Lauren accidentally shoots him. There’s blood everywhere, Lauren is sobbing while training the gun back on Zach, Zach is scared out of his mind, but gradually climbs the stairs. “Please work, she thinks, please work, please work.” It does.
Badly shaken, she barely looks at the new husband as he arrives, but she has made a decision, come what may. She gets him out of the house on some errand and goes up to the attic herself, allowing its own strange electrical current to start a fire. She gathers up some essentials and leave the attic to burn. The novel ends there.