51 pages • 1 hour read
Emily St. John MandelA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Mirella attends a concert. The composer is the brother of Vincent, a former friend of Mirella’s. Mirella’s husband invested in Vincent’s husband’s investment fund. When Mirella and her husband found out the fund was a Ponzi scheme, her husband killed himself and Mirella stopped talking to Vincent. The concert includes Vincent’s camera footage that the composer obtained after her death. The camera captured a maple tree, then blackness with sounds of music and ambient noise of people, like in a train station. (This scene resembles Edwin’s experience.)
Ten years later, Mirella’s new girlfriend, Louisa, tells a story about her aunt. Her aunt’s husband was cheating on her—he kept an entirely different family across the street, and the aunt only found out when the husband used the wrong credit card to pay for one child’s tuition. This causes Mirella to think that Vincent might not have known that her husband was running a Ponzi scheme. She tells Louisa about seeing Vincent once when she was bartending with a completely different look, but she didn’t talk to her. Louisa suggests that Mirella try to find Vincent.
While working at her job as a receptionist in a tile showroom, Mirella searches the internet but cannot locate Vincent on social media.
By Emily St. John Mandel
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