Miranda Carroll, an executive at a shipping company, is on the south coast of Malaysia on a weeklong assignment to observe conditions among a cluster of container ships sitting idle offshore after an economic collapse. Her longtime colleague Leon has sent her to reassure the skeleton crews that the company is paying attention.

By helicopter, Miranda visits one of the anchored ships with an interpreter and a local crew chief. The crew are quiet, tense, and afraid of pirates; one man tells Miranda how lonely it is, and she learns another hasn’t been ashore in three months.

That evening, standing on the beach below her hotel, Miranda is overwhelmed by an unexpected loneliness as she watches the ships’ lights glowing on the horizon. While she waits for a call she expects from a friend, her phone rings with an unfamiliar number.

The caller is Clark Thompson, Arthur Leander’s friend, who recognizes Miranda from past parties and gently urges her to sit down before giving the news: Arthur died the previous night of a massive heart attack. Clark explains that Arthur collapsed onstage during the fourth act of King Lear; doctors in the audience tried to save him, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

After the call ends, Miranda absorbs the ordinariness of the moment—learning, from far away, that the man she once expected to grow old with is simply gone. She notes the time difference and thinks of Clark in Manhattan, aware she is living in the last stretch of an era when instantaneous long-distance calls across the world are still routine.