He’s enchanted by the band’s lead singer and violinist, Annika, though she rejects his advances. One night, Paul goes to a nightclub and meets a band called Baltica. Paul, an aspiring composer, is recently out of rehab for drug addiction and struggling to make friends at college in Toronto. Snippets of her life flash before her eyes. Olivia’s ghost also visits Vincent the night Vincent drowns while working on the Neptune Cumberland: it’s the shock of seeing Olivia that indirectly causes Vincent to become distracted, drop her camera, and fall overboard.The novel begins in December 2018 with a series of connected fragments of speech depicting the moments leading up to Vincent’s death as she falls overboard from the Neptune Cumberland into the stormy sea below. Alkaitis sees Olivia’s ghost on several occasions while he is in prison, which is indicative of the guilt he feels about bankrupting and betraying her. After losing her life savings to Alkaitis’s fraud, Olivia can no longer afford rent on her New York City apartment and is forced to move in with her sister. The fact of Jonathan and Olivia’s friendship makes it all the more abhorrent that Jonathan keeps from Olivia the fact that he’s running a Ponzi scheme and defrauding her of her life’s savings. Jonathan likes being around Olivia because it makes him feel closer to Lucas, whom he never really got the chance to know. Olivia and Jonathan keep in touch after their initial meeting to discuss Olivia’s investment, and they become friends. Olivia’s sister Monica, who’s a retired lawyer by the time the painting sells, suggests that Olivia invest her new wealth and recommends Jonathan Alkaitis, though she’s unaware of Olivia’s oddly coincidental connection to Jonathan. That Olivia ultimately benefits financially from her betrayal of Lucas illustrates how people’s greed and self-interest can make them complicit, if only indirectly, in the downfall of others. Forty years later, there’s a retrospective exhibition of 1950s art, and the portrait of Lucas sells for a large sum of money. It’s at this showing that Olivia first meets a young Jonathan Alkaitis. Olivia’s decision to put his addiction on display for the world infuriates Lucas, who dies of an overdose shortly after he sees the painting. Olivia sees that Lucas has bruises on his arm from intravenous drug use and incorporates this detail into her painting without Lucas’s consent.

She first meets Jonathan Alkaitis through his older brother Lucas, who is also a painter, when she and Lucas agree to pose for each other. In the 1950s, she is a young painter in Manhattan, struggling to make ends meet and to make a name for herself.

The novel presents Olivia at various stages in her life.

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