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. Snippets of her life flash before her eyes.
The narrative picks up in late 1999. Paul, an aspiring composer, is recently out of rehab for drug addiction and struggling to make friends at college in Toronto. One night, Paul goes to a nightclub and meets a band called Baltica. He’s enchanted by the band’s lead singer and violinist, Annika, though she rejects his advances. The next time Paul runs into Baltica, he offers them bad ecstasy, which causes the overdose death of the band’s keyboardist, Charlie Wu. Paul flees Toronto for Vancouver, where his younger stepsister, Vincent, is living with her childhood friend, Melissa. Before arriving in Vancouver, Paul remembers the last time he saw Vincent, in 1995, when she was 13. Vincent had just gotten in trouble for graffitiing her school’s window in Port Hardy, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Paul had come to town to help out in the aftermath of Vincent’s mother’s recent drowning. Paul also blames Vincent for his parents’ divorce, since it was Paul’s father’s affair with Vincent’s mother and the birth of Vincent that instigated the divorce. The narrative returns to 1999. Paul arrives at Vincent and her friend Melissa’s sketchy apartment. Paul, Vincent, and Melissa go out dancing. Paul sees Charlie’s ghost in multiple clubs.
The narrative skips ahead to Spring 2005, at the Hotel Caiette, a luxury resort on a remote tip of Vancouver Island. In the middle of the night, someone scrawls a threatening message, “why don’t you swallow broken glass,” on the lobby’s huge glass wall, which thoroughly disturbs Walter, the night manager, and Vincent, who is working as the hotel’s bartender. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive kept awake by financial worries, is the only guest to see the message before it’s covered up. Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy New York financier who owns the hotel and visits a few times each year, arrives a few hours later and doesn’t see the graffiti. The next night, Alkaitis and Prevant have dinner together. Walter goes over security footage with Raphael, the hotel’s general manager, though they don’t find anything useful. Walter reveals that Paul, the night houseman, has been acting strangely and, shortly before the graffiti appeared, had asked about Alkaitis’s arrival. When Walter confronts Paul about the graffiti, Paul acts cagey and mumbles something about needing money. Walter fires him. Shortly after this, Vincent leaves and quits her job with little notice. A year goes by. Walter learns that Vincent and Alkaitis are now married.
The narrative switches to Vincent’s perspective, outlining the years that follow her departure from the Hotel Caiette. In 2005, Vincent leaves Caiette to become Jonathan Alkaitis’s “trophy wife,” though the two will never actually legally marry. The couple resides in Jonathan’s suburban Connecticut home. At the start of their relationship, Vincent is 21, and Jonathan is 34 years her senior. They have an arrangement in which Vincent makes herself beautiful and available to Jonathan whenever he needs her (such as to accompany him to dinners with potential investors) and, in exchange, she’s free to enjoy the life of luxury his immense wealth affords them. Vincent had been searching for a way to escape her precarious life as a bartender when she met Jonathan and, though she knows their arrangement has its drawbacks, she accepts them and the stability this new, wealthy life affords her. Vincent recalls different moments from her life with Jonathan, including an awkward introduction to Jonathan’s daughter Claire and meeting an investor named Faisal and his girlfriend, Mirella, who becomes Vincent’s best friend. Vincent recounts a time she and Jonathan went to Nice with Yvette Bertolli, one of Jonathan’s investment associates. In Nice, Jonathan tells Vincent about a supposedly “unhinged” woman named Ella Kaspersky who believes that the success of Alkaitis’s fund is the result of fraud and wants to see him punished for his crimes. In the last few months Vincent spends with Jonathan, she also meets Olivia Collins, an elderly former artist who once painted Jonathan’s deceased older brother, Lucas.
The narrative picks up years later with Alkaitis, who is serving a 170-year prison sentence after being arrested for fraud in 2008. He’s adjusted to his new life in a medium-security facility, though he grows increasingly obsessed with imagining alternate realities, or “counterlives.” As time progresses, it becomes harder for Alkaitis to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined. He often sees the ghosts of investors he’s betrayed wandering around the prison, taunting him.
The narrative shifts, focusing on Vincent’s life following the collapse of Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme. After Jonathan’s arrest in December 2008, Vincent moves out of his house and into a small apartment outside the city. She finds work bartending and as a cook. While bartending one night, she sees Mirella, who ignores her. Mirella’s rejection reinvigorates Vincent’s desire to go to sea, something her mother had done when she was a young woman, and Vincent gets a job working as a cook on the Neptune Cumberland. There, she meets Geoffrey Bell, the third mate, who becomes her boyfriend, though Vincent’s refusal to be dependent on anyone causes rifts in the relationship.
The narrative flashes back to the very end of Vincent’s stay in Alkaitis’s “kingdom of money,” in 2008, when she discovers that Paul, now a successful composer, stole her video recordings and is using them as backdrops to his compositions. Vincent goes to see one of Paul’s concerts in Brooklyn but can’t bring herself to confront him about the stolen recordings. Part 2 ends in December 2008, when Jonathan’s receptionist, Simone, urgently summons Vincent to Jonathan’s office. Vincent arrives and walks in on a tense meeting between Claire, Harvey, and Jonathan. Jonathan asks Vincent if she knows what a Ponzi scheme is.
Earlier that day, Alkaitis calls a meeting with all the Floor 17 employees (those on the asset management team, the sector of the firm responsible for the fraudulent activity) and explains that the company is having problems securing a loan due to liquidity problems and that investors are pulling out. Everyone begins to panic. Enrico buys a plane ticket to Mexico, and Harvey composes a confession. Joelle and Oskar also worry about their fates. Alkaitis order Simone to stay late and shred documents. Simone, who is new to the firm and unaware of its fraud, does as she’s told. Nobody has fun at the holiday party later that night.
After the party, Oskar accompanies a distraught Vincent to Jonathan’s empty apartment, and they have a one-night stand. Early the next morning, Jonathan is arrested at his Connecticut house. Leon Prevant, who is in Las Vegas now, working as a consultant for his old shipping company, hears about the Ponzi scheme’s collapse the next day. Authorities begin to investigate Alkaitis, and Ella Kaspersky appears on the news to discuss the case. The next day, Harvey gives a handwritten confession to the authorities. Later on, Simone brings Claire some of her belongings from the office building. A distraught Claire wryly tells Simone that this experience will be a great story to tell at future cocktail parties. Oskar is arrested. Six months later, Alkaitis is sentenced to 170 years in prison.
Ghosts torment Alkaitis in prison. He’s begun to see the ghost of Olivia Collins and finds out from Julie Freeman, a journalist who interviews him for a book she’s writing, that Olivia has passed away. In a separate prison interview with Freeman, Alkaitis discusses his tumultuous interactions with Ella Kaspersky, beginning at the Hotel Caiette in 1999, when he’d tried to convince her to invest with him. Ella did some research and began to suspect Alkaitis was committing fraud. She prompted the SEC to investigate Alkaitis, though they found nothing. Alkaitis remembers the last time he saw Kaspersky. He’d been out to dinner with his first wife, Suzanne, right before Suzanne’s death from cancer, when the couple spotted Kaspersky across the room. As they passed by Kaspersky’s table on their way out, Suzanne cruelly told her to “swallow broken glass,” an allusion to the wine glass a waiter had accidentally shattered into Ella’s bread basket. Alkaitis continues to fixate on the past, recalling his last memory with Lucas before he died of an overdose.
The narrative flashes forward to 2018. Leon and his wife Marie have been forced out of their house and are living a precarious, transient existence in an RV. Leon is overjoyed when Miranda, his former junior colleague, offers him work as a consultant for an investigation into a disappearance that occurred on one of the company’s ships, the Neptune Cumberland. Leon will serve as a witness beside Saparelli, who works in the company’s security office. Though the investigation presents plausible evidence to suspect that Geoffrey Bell was involved in Vincent’s disappearance, Saparelli convinces Leon to turn a blind eye, arguing that Leon won’t be called for future consulting work if he brings a company scandal to light.
The narrative flashes forward to 2029. Simone tells fellow partygoers about her experience working as Alkaitis’s receptionist. The fates of Alkaitis’s other former employees are also revealed. In 2018, Paul, now a successful composer, is in Edinburgh for a music festival. He continues to struggle with substance abuse problems. He runs into Ella Kaspersky, who had bribed him to write the threatening message on the wall at the Hotel Caiette so many years before. They both apologize for their past behavior. Later that night, Paul ruminates on everything he’s done to Vincent over the years. He tries unsuccessfully to justify his actions. On his way back to his hotel, he sees Vincent’s ghost.
The novel ends where it began, with Vincent plunging into the water. It’s revealed that Vincent’s death really was an accident, and that she lost her balance and fell overboard while filming video footage of the sea during a storm. In Vincent’s final moments, her life flashes before her eyes. Her ghost visits people she’s met over the years. She visits Paul, who is in rehab, and they both apologize for being “thieves” during their lives. Finally, Vincent visits Caiette, where she spots her mother sitting along the shore. Vincent realizes that her mother’s death must have been an accident, too. Vincent calls to her mother, who looks up in surprise.
