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 22-42Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
On the flight, Cherry returns to her seat but makes one last prediction: Allegra will die of self-harm at age 28.
Chapter 23 Summary
At some point after the flight, Cherry regrets having predicted Allegra will die at 28.
Chapter 24 Summary
At some point after the flight, Cherry introduces herself. Her name is Cherry, named after a cherry blossom tree her mother saw in a dream. She once threw a spring roll at someone who repeatedly called her Cheryl.
Chapter 25 Summary
It’s just after the flight. Leo learns one of his deadlines has become “even tighter” as he stands in a cab line at the Sydney airport, where Ethan joins him. Ethan is concerned about his prediction (dying in a fight at age 30), while Leo tries to laugh off his own predicted early death.
Chapter 26 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry recalls again how everyone on the flight had looked somehow familiar to her, though she realized they were actually strangers.
Chapter 27 Summary
In Sydney, just after the flight, a girl named Kayla Halfpenny chats with Eve, the bride, about the psychic on the plane. Kayla worries because her prediction is death in a car accident. Eve finds her own prediction, death by intimate partner homicide, ludicrous—her husband Dom is so gentle.
Chapter 28 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry remembers waking up after napping on the flight. She blanked out on her experience making predictions. She felt unwell and thirsty. She saw Eve in the cab line and realized Eve really was wearing Cherry’s old wedding dress because Cherry had given it to a thrift shop.
Chapter 29 Summary
After the flight, Ethan and Leo share a cab, and Ethan talks about Harvey’s funeral. Ethan likes Leo, who reminds him of Harvey. They discuss their predictions: Leo’s workplace accident would take place after he turns 43 in November, while Ethan’s death in a fight would take place when he’s 30, the age he turns in October.
Chapter 30 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. She says the first death took place on the same day as her Introduction to Line Dancing class.
Chapter 31 Summary
The day after the flight, Leo tells his wife, Neve, about the lady on the plane. He is the worrier, and she is the soother in the relationship. Their daughter Bridie overhears and asks if her father is going to die.
Chapter 32 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Some people believe they are charmed, Cherry says, and when something bad happens they look for someone to blame.
Chapter 33 Summary
Eve and Dom are on their honeymoon at an island resort. Dom is a personal trainer who is, in Eve’s mind, too kind to his clients. She tells him she is not worried that Dom will murder her, and remembers how her father bribed a tarot card reader to tell her mother he was the man of her dreams.
Chapter 34 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry remembers one of her mother’s regular customers, a beautiful bride who had an unhappy marriage and died in a house fire that might have been set by her husband. She thinks her mother can’t have seen the woman’s future, or she would have warned her.
Chapter 35 Summary
Paula is at her sister’s wedding with her husband, Matt, and two children. She is haunted by the prediction about Timmy’s death by drowning. Matt tells Paula not to overreact. She has a memory of her 17-year-old self holding a knife to her father’s neck.
Chapter 36 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry reflects that after her identity became known, she received both hate mail and thank-you cards.
Chapter 37 Summary
Ethan has a crush on his flatmate, a beautiful frozen-fish heiress named Jasmine. They go to see a psychic because Jasmine has said that Ethan needs a “second opinion” about Cherry’s prediction. The psychic, Luca, tells Ethan that there is someone in his life whom Ethan wants to be more than a friend, and that love is coming into his life by September or October. Ethan tells Luca about Cherry’s prediction, and Luca tells him he doesn’t believe anything is preordained. He cannot tell people their futures because as soon as he does, they change their behavior. Luca describes Harvey’s strange laugh and says Harvey wants Ethan to “have faith” and that “[g]uys like us always wait too long to make the first move” (142).
Chapter 38 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry says people are always intrigued to learn that her mother, who called herself “Madame Mae,” was a fortune teller. Cherry recalls learning about chaos theory at a birthday party from a bearded man who quotes the title of the academic paper that gave rise to the concept of the butterfly effect: “Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” (145). At her hostess’s urging, Cherry talked about her mother’s profession. Cherry’s grandmother also read palms.
Chapter 39 Summary
Sue has dinner with a friend, Caterina, and tells her that Cherry predicted she would die of pancreatic cancer. Caterina, a doctor, urges her to get some baseline tests. Sue worries she hasn’t really lived her life, as she was always thinking about the future.
Chapter 40 Summary
The narrative returns to Cherry’s viewpoint. Cherry says that on the flight “[she] was the butterfly” (156)—or the seagull, the original analogy for the agent of change in the butterfly effect. She went through the plane “squawking” her predictions and her actions had consequences. She was, she decides, an “agent of chaos” (156).
Chapter 41 Summary
Paula is driving 40 minutes each week to take Timmy to swim lessons. Although he is under six months old, he has a natural affinity for water. Thoughts of Cherry’s prediction that Timmy will drown at age seven run through her mind constantly. She remembers the psychiatrist she saw at age 17 for her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Chapter 42 Summary
Cherry thinks her mother was wrong: “Fate can be fought” with changes in diet, regular doctor’s visits, fastening seat belts, and other preventative measures (161).
Chapters 22-42 Analysis
Moriarty continues to explore The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny and entertains the possibility that free will and fate can coexist. To this end, she presents two characters with genuine psychic abilities: Luca and Madame Mae, Cherry’s mother. Every part of their predictions for two point-of-view characters, Ethan and Cherry, come true.
Moriarty uses the concept of the butterfly effect to illustrate the vast consequences of Cherry’s predictions and to explore how fate and free will can coexist. An offshoot of chaos theory, the butterfly effect proposes that small variations within a system can have significant effects. In its most famous example, a butterfly flapping its wings can eventually cause a tornado in another part of the world. Luca suggests how the butterfly effect works when he says that nothing is preordained: The moment he predicts someone’s future, they change their behavior. “See the logic?” (141), he asks Ethan.
The novel illustrates this logic through Cherry, from whom a prediction is enough to elicit extreme change. Paula, in taking Timmy to swimming lessons, may be circumventing fate. The ending of the book reveals that Timmy does nearly drown at age seven, but that his swimming lessons make him a strong enough swimmer to survive a freak accident.
However, the novel also implies that the inverse may be true: In knowing one’s fate, we may act in a way to make it happen, much like how Oedipus receives the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and inadvertently makes it so. Kayla Halfpenny, in trying to avoid Cherry’s prediction that she will die in a car accident, becomes a super cautious driver. However, instead of surviving as Timmy does, a drunk driver hits her. As Cherry notes, this may be because of her prediction: Had Kayla been going faster, she may have been at a different crossing when the driver came hurtling down the road. Ultimately, the novel leaves the reason for Kayla’s death ambiguous: It isn’t clear if she dies due to the fulfillment of Cherry’s prediction or the exertion of her own free will.
The meteorologist who came up with the concept of the butterfly effect originally used a seagull as the agent of chaos in his analogy, as Cherry knows. This is why she says she was the butterfly “or the less poetic seagull” (156). This is one of several places in Here One Moment where Moriarty uses the seagull to symbolize an agent of change. Much later in the story, a seagull might possibly save Ethan’s life when it stops Jasmine’s jealous ex from attacking him.
Moriarty researches her topics extensively and cites various sources in her acknowledgments, including a book by a “conflicted” psychic. She may have been aware that the butterfly effect disrupts scientific attempts to prove that psychic powers exist: If psychic phenomena are real, then researchers may be subtly interacting with their subjects and changing the results. This parallels her fictional portrayal of the theory.
In this section, doctors are again the real-world psychics who can fight fate through regular health checks. Cherry admits that people can’t necessarily win against fate, but “you should at least put up a fight” (161).
Moriarty breaks the pattern of alternating points of view at three different places in the novel, including Chapters 23 and 24. Whenever a break in the pattern occurs, Cherry reveals something fairly inconsequential in the first chapter and something deeply personal in the following one. In this case, she finally reveals her name in Chapter 24.
The novel is peppered with odd details that are not explained until much later in the story. For example, the narrative does not reveal why Cherry is so sensitive about being named Cherry and not Cheryl (and why she threw a spring roll at someone who repeatedly called her Cheryl) until Chapter 101. Here, Cherry will reveal that a misunderstanding about her name deprived her of the adorable baby girl she was ready to adopt with her first husband. Paula’s recollection of holding a knife to her father’s neck is a similar detail and is not explained until Chapter 96, where it is revealed that Paula was engaging in exposure therapy for OCD. Like Cherry’s gradual shift in identity from a psychic “Death Lady” to a dehydrated actuary, Moriarty provides a logical explanation for nearly everything that happens—except for those two psychics and the meaning—fate or free will?—behind Kayla and Timmy’s death and survival.
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