The Time Traveler's Wife

After years of intermittent encounters throughout her childhood, Clare and Henry marry once their timelines converge at the Newberry Library. Their marriage is soon strained by Clare's repeated miscarriages, caused by the same genetic anomaly that gives Henry his chrono-impairment. After five failed pregnancies, Henry gets a vasectomy to spare Clare further loss. Despite this, a younger version of Henry travels forward in time, sleeps with Clare without either of their older selves controlling it, and Clare becomes pregnant with a daughter, Alba. Alba is born with the same time-traveling condition, but unlike her father she eventually learns to exert some control over where and when she travels.

Before Alba's birth, Henry travels forward and meets her at age ten during a school trip, and in the course of this encounter he learns the devastating fact that he will die when Alba is only five years old. As Henry approaches the final year foretold, his ability to survive his own displacements deteriorates: after being stranded overnight in a freezing Chicago parking garage, he suffers severe frostbite, and his feet are amputated upon his return to the present. Without his feet, Henry can no longer run or hide during his uncontrolled jumps, and both he and Clare understand that his time is now dangerously short.

On New Year's Eve 2006, Henry is pulled back to the Michigan woods in 1984, the same stretch of woods where, years earlier in the book's chronology, it was foreshadowed that a hunting accident would occur. Clare's brother, Mark, out hunting, mistakes Henry for game and shoots him. Henry manages to travel back to the present moment, badly wounded, and dies in Clare's arms.

Clare is left devastated, alone with young Alba. Sometime later she discovers a letter Henry had written for her in advance, instructing her to stop waiting for him indefinitely, but also revealing that they will have one more reunion in her future. That reunion arrives when Clare is eighty-two years old and Henry, pulled from earlier in his own timeline, appears to her at age forty-three for a final visit. The novel's closing image returns to Clare in her old age, still watching, still waiting for Henry to appear again, as she has done for most of her life.