Six months before his death, Damon suggests that he and his ex-wife, Melissa Lister, challenge each other to do new things before they turn 30. She reluctantly agrees. Even though they’re divorced, he still loves her. Damon challenge Melissa to sing karaoke, and she does. She has a more difficult challenge in store for him.

Melissa challenges Damon to go swimming in the ocean at Brighton, even though she knows he hates swimming in open water. It’s February, and the water is cold. Melissa and Damon swim out to a buoy. They’re on their way back to shore when Melissa realizes that she can’t see Damon anymore.

Melissa searches for Damon in the water. She realizes that he’s been caught by the rip tide. She finds him and brings his unconscious body back to shore. On the beach, she realizes that he’s not breathing and doesn’t have a pulse.

Melissa performs emergency procedures on Damon. She’s a paramedic and experienced swimmer. She tells a passer-by to call emergency services. After a few minutes, she manages to revive Damon. When he regains consciousness, he asks her who the boy he “think[s]” he killed is.

Two weeks after he almost drowns, Damon is at the bar with his friends, including Melissa, to celebrate his survival. He can’t drink because he’s on antibiotics to treat a possible infection from swallowing so much water. He has been feeling anxious ever since his near-death experience and is having trouble enjoying the party. He wonders if the experience has “taken more of a toll on [Melissa] than she’s ready to admit” (22).

Damon reflects on how, during the train ride from Brighton to Northampton after he was released from the hospital, he kept going over what he saw when he almost died. He saw an image of a red-headed boy bleeding from the mouth and ear reaching out for Damon’s help. Melissa had reassured him that he would not have forgotten killing someone. Damon is not so sure because he doesn’t remember much of his childhood.

While standing outside the bar, Damon gives money to an unhoused person because he feels that he could have ended up like them because he grew up in foster care. Suddenly, Damon thinks he catches sight of the red-headed boy on a nearby bus, but the sight quickly disappears.

Damon awakes on Monday morning. He realizes that he has slept for 20 hours but still feels tired. When he sleeps, he feels the cold water of the sea and returns to the visions he had while drowning. He gets ready for work.

While in the shower, he examines his many tattoos, the meanings of some of which are obscure even to him, such as the words “Offering Others Direction in Sorrow” across his collarbone (29). When he steps out of the shower, he sees small footprints in blood leading to his bedroom.

Damon works as a stockboy in a grocery store. His co-worker Jason is as dismissive of Damon’s account of seeing a dead boy as Melissa. Damon goes to the bathroom at work, where he’s confronted with the vision of the red-headed boy reaching out to him. Damon is scared and runs away.

For three days, Damon has been haunted by the vision of the dead boy whenever he’s alone. He realizes that it’s a hallucination, but he can’t determine why the boy is haunting him. When he finally goes home after work, he leaves the television on and the window open so that the sounds will prevent the boy from returning.

Damon goes to the fertility clinic with Melissa and her new girlfriend, Adrienne. Damon has agreed to provide the sperm for their child. Adrienne says that Damon seems “a little out of it” (37), but he brushes off her concerns.

Damon thinks about how he discovered that Melissa was gay when their sex life ended and he found gay porn on her laptop. She soon after told him that she’s gay. Damon was sad, but he didn’t argue. He has known Melissa since they were teenagers. He enjoyed the time she spent with him after the drowning because it gave him hope that they might be together again even though she’s happy and in love with Adrienne.

While in the clinic, Damon anxiously rubs the semicolon tattoo on his wrist. He hasn’t seen the vision of the dead boy for three days, but he worries that the vision will soon return.

They are at the clinic to meet with a counselor about their birth plan. Melissa had gotten pregnant while she and Damon were married, but she told him that she lost the pregnancy. He still wants a child to have the family he never had when he was younger. That is why, eight months ago, he agreed to provide the sperm for Adrienne to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization (IVF).

While meeting with the counselor, Damon sees the dead boy writhing in pain with an open mouth. He yells, “No,” and runs away. He worries that he’s becoming mentally unwell.

Damon goes to visit his favorite foster mother, Helena Obugachu. Although she’s only in her late fifties, she’s frail from having had a stroke. She is reading Dead in the Water by Ed James, which “could also be the title of [Damon’s] autobiography” (44). She is the only link that Damon has between his past and present, but he thinks she’s hiding something from him.

Damon asks Helena if there’s anything in his records about “the death of a child” (47). He explains about the visions of the dead red-headed boy he’s been having since his near-death experience. Helena is surprised when Damon says that he thinks he might have had something to do with the boy’s death. Helena says that it’s only his mind playing tricks on him. When he leaves, he sees a vision of the boy just behind her on the stairwell.

Helena reflects on how frightened and vulnerable Damon was when he was first put in her care. He thinks of her only as a foster mother; he doesn’t know that their ties are deeper than that. Helena worries that Damon’s vision of a dead boy is “only […] the beginning” (51). She has done her best to protect him from the truth.

Damon is seeing the dead boy with increasing frequency. He has tried to drown himself to induce the near-death experience and hopefully learn more about the vision, but he was not able to. He decides to see a hypnotherapist to learn more.

Damon startles at a flash of lightning while he stands on the doorstep of the hypnotherapist. He has electrophobia, a fear of electricity. He gets a text from Melissa reminding him of his next fertility-clinic appointment. Damon then enters the hypnotherapist’s office. He explains that he wants to use the process to learn more about the dead boy he keeps seeing.

While under hypnosis, Damon recalls seeing the boy on the ground bleeding ahead of him. They are near a road. Then, Damon sees himself pulling something from his pocket. He’s overwhelmed with panic before he can finish seeing more of the scene.

The hypnotherapist explains that “brains prefer to avoid reliving trauma, so they build protective shields” (59). She suggests that Damon see a counselor to help him process more, but he rejects the idea and leaves. He feels the boy haunting him as he walks to the car.