A new, young line operation manager (LOM) for the railway is initiated by his veteran colleagues. To desensitize him to the grim realities of the job, they share graphic stories about cleaning up body parts after suicides on the tracks. The new LOM returns home that night, telling his mother his day was fine but feeling that a part of his innocence has died forever.

Travis sits with a homeless man in the cold town square, keeping him company as he freezes to death.

Meanwhile, Dalia has moved with Neda to a new house. She discovers Neda in a room filled with boxes containing the belongings of her deceased daughter, Layla. Dalia screams at Neda for being in the room, but her anger quickly turns to overwhelming remorse. She collapses, apologizing and clinging to her crying daughter.

On Christmas Day, Dalia and Neda go for a simple walk in the snow while Travis observes the many dying and living individuals during the holiday. Neda’s father, Solomon, visits to pick her up and invites Dalia to their Christmas dinner. Dalia refuses. Just before New Year’s, Travis watches—unseen by her—as she considers dying by suicide in the tub and sees an entire future where Neda forgets about her. Dalia notices him, understands who he is now, and asks why he wouldn’t stop her, shocked by his detachment. She admits that Neda would be better off without her, but she decides not to die yet.

They get food, go on a walk, and return home, where she asks him not to leave. As the New Year begins, they dance to the radio. He considers the many people whom he simultaneously collects, the timeline of his existence looped together, and thinks that life’s beauty is the only thing that keeps him going.

Travis visits the elderly woman who is terrified of her worsening dementia. Knowing Travis’s true nature as Death, she begs him to end her life before she loses her identity completely. He gently refuses, telling her that it is not her time.

Dalia returns to her job as a midwife but feels detached from the happiness of the new parents. In a moment of bitterness toward a family she perceives as having a perfect life, she maliciously lies to them, inventing a rare lung condition called “myovascular bronchiolitis” to frighten them about their newborn’s health. Before leaving the hospital, Dalia steals several boxes of prescription pills from a locker. Later, at home, she takes some of the pills to numb her grief while caring for Neda.

At winter’s end, Travis and Dalia dig up the dead remnants of their plot in the community garden. After, he enjoys his time with her so much that he determines he must leave her alone, worried about her frailty as a human. Dalia later visits Layla’s dad, Nick, to find him struggling immensely with an alcohol addiction. She recalls learning that Nick was abused as a child. She brings him food.

Travis visits Keith Rotherham, a former “strongest man in the world” who is dying of cancer. Keith confesses that despite his powerful image, he is frightened of death and deeply regrets being an absent father. He shows Travis his prized Lamborghini, a car he worked his whole life to afford, admitting that owning it brought him no joy. He dies suddenly, laughing about everything he’s lifted.

The story then shifts to show that Dalia has begun supporting Layla’s father, Nick, in his recovery from an alcohol addiction by driving him to his meetings. Elsewhere, a woman named Faye moves out of her childhood home, a mortuary cosmetologist respectfully applies makeup to a corpse, and a middle-aged woman named Giselle critiques her aging body before feeling renewed by her husband’s expression of attraction. Travis experiences the lives of many people as a disorienting blur, recounting their joys and losses, before returning to Nick and Dalia.

Dalia and Nick go to the park with Neda, having a nice day where Dalia finally feels some relief amid her grief. They go for food, during which Nick expresses how he wants to heal. His wording makes Dalia believe he blames her for Layla’s death, as—if she had washed the paint off her daughter sooner—she could’ve brought Layla to the hospital earlier and perhaps saved her life. Dalia angrily admits she blames herself, too.

Barry Lightfoot, an unhealthy office manager, suffers a massive heart attack after a meeting. After being discharged from the hospital, he immediately returns to his habits of eating junk food, drinking cider, and smoking. Travis appears in his living room and informs him that he will have a second, fatal heart attack in 10 minutes.

Panicked, Barry destroys his cigarettes, asserting he can get better. Travis says his death is certain, calling him pathetic and disgusting. Barry calls his ex-wife, Sonia, to apologize for his failings as a husband and father. He then puts his wedding video in the DVD player and dies on the sofa as he watches it. A death notice for Barry Lightfoot appears.

The narrative returns to Dalia, who is at home alone, taking stolen pills and drinking wine in an attempt to die by suicide. Her plan is interrupted when Nick arrives unexpectedly at her door. He explains that he ran into Travis, who urged him to come and apologize for a recent argument. Nick’s presence breaks Dalia’s resolve, and she collapses in his arms, admitting she is not well. Travis’s indirect intervention has saved her life.

Amid this, Travis curses the impact Dalia has had on him and wishes that he could give up his responsibility as Death. He frantically imagines himself in a copse with a mother figure, like the earlier vignette where a fawn was killed, except that he is a suffering child needing the comfort of a “Mother” to ease the pain of his role. In this breakdown, he expresses resistance to the fact that he had to collect Layla’s soul. He visits Layla’s grave on her birthday. He then watches from a distance as Dalia does the same, then he returns to his apartment, packs it up, and leaves. 

Dalia picks up the flowers Travis laid at Layla’s grave and brings them across the cemetery to the headstone of her brother, Samuel Preston, the man who died in a car accident at the beginning of the novel. She thinks of their childhood in a small town and the slow, boring death of her beloved father.