Ethan Chang, a twenty-nine-year-old software engineer, is on the delayed flight from Hobart back to Sydney after attending his first-ever funeral—that of his friend Harvey, who died of a brain aneurysm at age twenty-nine while heading to see a movie. Ethan has been fixated on death all day, trying to process the shock of Harvey's sudden passing. He reflects on their friendship: they were hired on the same day as junior software engineers, and although Harvey could be self-deprecating and gloomy, frequently lamenting that "guys like us" would never achieve much, their bond was real.

Ethan recalls details of the funeral—Harvey's uncle playing bagpipes, Harvey's father collapsing, the frantic eating at the wake, and Ethan's embarrassing moment of saying "I'm so sorry for your loss" to a caterer. He also thinks about his flatmate Jasmine, a frozen-fish heiress who coached him on funeral etiquette and who cut his steak after he broke his wrist in a humiliating rock-climbing accident. Ethan has been wrestling with whether what he feels counts as grief, telling himself he only knew Harvey for five years and wasn't family.

The two women seated beside him—one in the window seat, one in the middle—notice the older woman walking down the aisle making predictions. They film her on their phones, excited at the prospect of a psychic reading. The woman predicts melanoma at seventy-nine for the window-seat passenger and liver disease at eighty-seven for the middle-seat passenger. Then she turns to Ethan and predicts he will die of assault at age thirty.

Ethan's stomach drops—he is currently twenty-nine, making this prediction imminent. His seatmate bluntly notes "that sucks for you." But what truly breaks Ethan isn't the prediction itself; it's the instinct to text Harvey about this bizarre encounter, followed by the crushing realization that Harvey is gone and unreachable. This triggers an overwhelming wave of grief. Ethan begins crying uncontrollably on the plane, stunned that his body can produce such tears. His seatmate stands up and shouts at the older woman for making him cry. Through his tears, Ethan finally grasps the depth of his loss—thinking of Harvey's family, their pain, and the injustice of death—and acknowledges that he is truly, deeply sorry for his own loss.