After Thanksgiving dinner at his brother George's house, a man cleans up the kitchen and seethes about his brother's constant bragging. George's wife, Jane, brings in an armful of dishes, kisses her brother-in-law on the mouth, and leaves. The man fantasizes about her for months. Later, Jane calls the man and his wife, Claire, to say that George is at the police station. The man goes to pick him up, but George is addled and angry; he got in a car crash that killed three people, and he is clearly out of his right mind. At Jane and George's home, George deteriorates, babbling and wetting himself. Jane and George's brother take him to the hospital, where they check George into the psych ward. Claire needs to go to China for a business trip, and she tells her husband to stay home with Jane while George is in the hospital. The man takes George's place in the suburbs. As George's condition gets worse, Jane and George's brother sleep together more and more often. One night George escapes from the hospital and sees his brother and wife in bed together. He beats Jane with a lamp until she's bloody and unrecognizable. The man calls 911. George dresses in the man's clothes that the man wore that night before sleeping with Jane. Later, the police tell the man they have found newspaper clippings in the pockets of the clothes George wore that feature similar homewrecker situations that the man has engaged in with annotations that describe how the writer would carry out these violent situations differently. In the aftermath of the attack, the man visits Jane, George, and their children, trying to deflect blame from himself and pick up the pieces of the lives he's ruined.