64 pages • 2 hours read
Liane MoriartyHere One Moment
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 43-63Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 43 Summary
Allegra has told her mother that Cherry has predicted her death by self-harm within the year. Allegra’s mother is worried. There is a history of depression in the family, and Allegra’s grandmother died by suicide, giving Allegra a recurring nightmare about walls closing in on her. Allegra, meanwhile, is sleeping with Jonny Summers, the pilot who threw her friend’s doughnut in the trash. He cooks for her and is vulnerable around her, and she is beginning to like him very much.
Chapter 44 Summary
Cherry wants readers to know how she came to be the “Death Lady.” She mentions the importance of a dinner party and a ringing doorbell.
Chapter 45 Summary
Leo is under pressure from his boss to budget his time, and Bridie is now failing in math. Neve worries that Leo works too much and that he’ll regret it when he is old.
Chapter 46 Summary
Cherry remembers her childhood as a fortune teller’s daughter in an otherwise ordinary household in suburban Sydney. Her parents met at a dance after the war. Her aunt Pat lost her fiancé in the war and never married. Her father, an accountant, played math games with Cherry. He insists that his wife, Mae, has life insurance because he might be struck by lightning one day or get hit by a bus.
Chapter 47 Summary
Eve is horrified to discover that she and Dom are in debt, as neither has ever budgeted before.
Chapter 48 Summary
Cherry recalls how, when she was 10, her father was struck by lightning and killed while fishing with friends. She relates the unlikely event to the “Monte Carlo” or “gambler’s fallacy.” The fallacy describes an incident where a ball in a game of roulette repeatedly landed on black. Gamblers kept betting on red, thinking that the ball was overdue to land on red due to its many hits on black. The fallacy is the false belief that the probability of future events changes based on past events.
Chapter 49 Summary
Due to the prediction, Ethan is more aware of the possibility of violence when he is out. He is distressed by Jasmine’s handsome new boyfriend, Carter, who is very possessive. He calls Harvey without thinking and gets Harvey’s sister, Lila, who is friendly and understanding.
Chapter 50 Summary
Cherry eats her favorite Monte Carlo biscuit and thinks of how she loves to pull it apart to savor it.
Chapter 51 Summary
Cherry says that for the rest of her life, her mother believed she had foreseen her father’s death because she “felt” his death when he commented on possibly being struck by lightning. It is her mother’s “origin story” as a psychic.
Chapter 52 Summary
Eve is concerned about how Dom will take the news of their debt. Since childhood, he both sleepwalks and “sleep-talks.” Since Cherry’s prediction, he has discovered a phenomenon called “homicidal sleepwalking” and worries he will kill Eve in his sleep. He returns home from work with the news that he crashed the car and has forgotten to pay the car insurance.
Chapter 53 Summary
Cherry believes that “everyone loves a particular version of you” and when that person dies, the version goes with them (210).
Chapter 54 Summary
Leo continues to work too hard, and Bridie discovers a video showing that one of the “Death Lady’s” predictions has come true.
Chapter 55 Summary
Cherry believes, as her grandmother did, that listening to intuition can change your actions for the better. She remembers when her grandmother felt something was wrong and looked at baby Mae to find a snake in her baby basket. Grandpa thinks there must have been some physical cue, but Grandma disagrees vehemently. Cherry wonders why her mother could not predict, and so help avoid, her father’s death.
Chapter 56 Summary
Sue’s friend Caterina continues to bug her about getting medical tests. Caterina refers to the same video that Bridie has seen.
Chapter 57 Summary
Cherry reflects that when people believe in predictions, they change their actions.
Chapter 58 Summary
Paula’s sister sends her a video taken by a friend of Kayla Halfpenny, the young girl on the plane. The video shows Kayla driving her car at the moment a drunk driver slams into her. Kayla has died at age 19, just as Cherry predicted.
Chapter 59 Summary
The chapter’s only sentence is: “The flap of a seagull’s wing and everything changes” (225).
Chapter 60 Summary
Sue watches the video of Kayla’s accident and vows to schedule the tests Caterina has been bugging her about.
Chapter 61 Summary
Cherry has learned about Kayla Halfpenny’s life. She wonders if Kayla would have been elsewhere at the moment of impact if she hadn’t been driving so slowly and carefully as a result of Cherry’s prediction.
Chapter 62 Summary
Eve also discovers the video and shares it with Dom.
Chapter 63 Summary
Cherry reflects that a “hard determinist” would say the driver who killed Kayla could only have behaved as he did. Cherry, however, believes in free will, and the man chose to drink and drive. She hates him for making her prediction come true.
Chapters 43-63 Analysis
These chapters explore Cherry’s backstory and relationship with psychic abilities. Cherry’s mother, Mae, was a genuine psychic, as was her grandmother. However, Mae couldn’t prevent her husband’s death, even though she sensed that he was doomed. Even if psychic abilities are real, the novel implies, they aren’t flawless. Cherry knows she is not a psychic. At the same time, she believes in intuition. Her grandmother’s hunch to look down at Mae’s baby basket suggests the validity of following one’s instinct.
There is a constant tension between Cherry’s logical understanding of the gambler’s fallacy—past results cannot predict future ones—and her innate understanding that past results can influence future ones. Cherry believes that the fallacy and butterfly effect are real because people choose to give meaning to past events. For example, she muses that when someone gets a heads-up, they have to “believe. The person has to change their actions” (220).
Though Cherry doesn’t yet know it, the people from the plane whose deaths are supposedly imminent have already begun to change their behavior. Ethan is more aware of possible violence; Sue decides to schedule the medical tests her friend has urged her to have. Carter, Jasmine’s jealous boyfriend, suggests that Cherry’s prediction that Ethan will die from assault might come true.
The alternating chapters pattern breaks again with Chapters 50 and 51, told from Cherry’s first-person point of view. Chapter 50 seems inconsequential: Cherry describes how she loves to pull apart her favorite biscuit (cookie), the Monte Carlo. As in the past, the following chapter is emotionally deeper. It reveals how Mae believes she foresaw her husband’s death, and the beginning of math-loving Cherry’s lifelong fury over her mother’s fortune-telling.
Monte Carlo biscuits will take on increasing symbolic significance as the story progresses. They come to represent logic and the gambler’s fallacy, the false belief that past events predict future ones. They also align with the belief in free will over a predetermined fate. The biscuit reminds Cherry of the comforting fact of statistical independence.
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By Liane Moriarty
