60 pages • 2-hour read
Gone Before Goodbye
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Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use and death.
Chapter 6 Summary
Maggie meets Nadia in a private office for a pre-surgery consultation. Nadia surprises her by revealing that she speaks fluent English but wants this kept secret from her handlers. When Maggie asks if Nadia is being coerced, Nadia dismisses the concern, saying she understands the risks and is there by choice. She also reveals that Maggie’s room is bugged, though this office has no surveillance. Nadia insists she wants the surgery to become irresistible to Oleg.
The conversation turns personal when Nadia asks if Maggie has made sacrifices for love. Maggie admits that she is no longer married and has no one special in her life, then breaks down in tears after Nadia leaves. Alone, Maggie opens the app on her phone that displays an AI simulation of her deceased husband, Marc. She tells it about her location in Russia and the upcoming surgery, but it notes that it cannot track her location.
Ivan Brovski bursts in, furious after hearing her talking to a man. He snatches the phone and discovers Maggie is using a “griefbot”—an AI that mimics deceased loved ones through their digital footprints. Maggie explains that her sister Sharon created this advanced beta version using Marc’s complete digital history, and she is testing it. Ivan expresses sympathy for Marc’s death but confiscates the phone, promising to return it after the surgeries. He then reveals that he is Oleg’s personal physician.
Chapter 7 Summary
Ivan takes Maggie to a conference room to review the surgical plans. He reveals that he is an Oxford-trained general internist and gives Maggie electronic medical records for Oleg Ragoravich and Nadia Strauss. Maggie learns Nadia’s last name and that Ivan’s team interviewed her Baltimore surgical staff to replicate her protocols.
Ivan outlines the surgical schedule: Oleg at 10 am for a blepharoplasty, sliding genioplasty, and an open rhinoplasty using a custom artificial nose scaffold created with AI and three-dimensional printing—a procedure that Maggie has never encountered. Ivan explains that Dr. Barlow chose Maggie because she is a maverick who would embrace such challenges. She is professionally excited by the novel technique, but she realizes that the goal is clearly to alter Oleg’s appearance for disguise, not aesthetic improvement.
For Nadia’s breast augmentation, they have three sizes of silicone implants ready. While reviewing Nadia’s file, Maggie notices that she has only one kidney. Ivan claims Nadia donated it to her brother years ago and insists she has been medically cleared. When Maggie presses for details, Ivan states that Oleg met Nadia in a Dubai club and that Oleg values privacy. He concludes by insisting Maggie attend the evening ball, revealing that a wardrobe has been prepared for her.
Chapter 8 Summary
From her bedroom window, Maggie watches guests arrive for the ball. She discovers a closet full of clothes selected by AI based on photos scraped from the internet. After she dresses, Ivan escorts her to the massive ballroom offering an array of international cuisine.
A handsome American introduces himself as Charles Lockwood, a cardiothoracic surgeon who knew Marc and praises his surgical skill. After dismissing two flirtatious women in Russian, Lockwood claims that he is at the ball to raise funds for a startup. He asks if Trace Packer, Maggie’s former partner at WorldCures, is present.
Lockwood then stuns Maggie by claiming that Oleg Ragoravich was the main funder of WorldCures Alliance through a front called the Kasselton Foundation. He claims that Oleg was laundering money through their organization. As Nadia approaches, Lockwood whispers for Maggie to stay alert and vanishes.
Nadia and Maggie bond while sampling extravagant food, maintaining the pretense that they cannot communicate by using hand gestures. When Maggie asks about the kidney donation, Nadia becomes emotional and confesses the truth: When she was 16, her impoverished family sold her kidney. As part of the arrangement, they received money and new identities. Her mother and brother now live in the US, and Nadia Strauss is an assumed name. Nadia defends the choice as saving her family, and when Maggie asks why she remains with Oleg, Nadia tells her to mind her own business.
Chapter 9 Summary
Maggie accompanies Nadia to say goodnight to Oleg in a lavish private lounge overlooking the ballroom. Nadia leaves immediately after greeting him in Russian. Oleg reveals that Elton John will perform and offers to delay the surgeries so Maggie can attend, but she declines, wanting to rest and sleep before surgery the next day.
Oleg describes greed as not wanting more but fearing losing what one already possesses. Maggie asks about his connection to WorldCures Alliance and the Kasselton Foundation. Oleg denies any knowledge of either, swearing on his children’s lives, and Maggie believes him. When she asks why he is undergoing surgery designed to make him unrecognizable, Oleg deflects.
The conversation shifts when Oleg reveals that he has been observing the ball and knows that Maggie has grown close to Nadia. He asks how they communicate when Nadia supposedly cannot speak English, making clear he knows Nadia has been lying. Oleg warns Maggie that Nadia tells many stories about herself and that none of them are true.
Chapter 10 Summary
The next morning, Maggie enters the operating room with profound emotion, feeling she has returned home. She successfully performs Oleg’s complex facial reconstruction, including implanting the artificial nose scaffold. Ivan Brovski observes the entire procedure and compliments her exceptional skill. She then performs Nadia’s breast augmentation. After the surgery concludes, the nurse removes the grounding pad from Nadia’s thigh, revealing a tattoo of a winking serpent with a halo. Maggie is stunned, recognizing it as identical to a unique tattoo Marc had from a drunken college night in New Orleans.
Maggie goes to check on Oleg but finds his recovery room empty. Hurrying through the corridors, she finds the palace in disarray: The Mona Lisa room Oleg had shown her now has different paintings, and one of the fake Gardner Museum pieces is missing. Ivan finds her and orders her immediate departure by helicopter. He refuses to return her phone, and after a guard whispers urgently to him, Ivan dismisses her concerns and tells her to prepare for departure. The guard follows her to her room to pack, but Maggie tricks him and sprints back to the medical wing.
She locks herself in Nadia’s recovery room. As Nadia wakes, Maggie asks about the tattoo. Nadia is terrified that Maggie saw it and reveals that she received it while unconscious during her kidney removal—a brand from the surgeon. When Maggie admits her husband had the same tattoo, Nadia explains the surgeon was a white man known as the Snake. She adds that a man named Trace—Maggie’s former partner—was present and tried to stop it.
Ivan and the guard burst into the room with a nurse. Nadia feigns unconsciousness. Ivan angrily seizes Maggie’s arm and insists it is time to leave.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
The procedures performed at the Russian palace embody Maggie’s transformation from someone who uses her surgical skills as tools of healing to someone whose skills have become a tool for deception and commodification. Oleg’s facial reconstruction is explicitly designed not for healing or aesthetic improvement but for disguise, with the goal of making him unrecognizable. The use of a custom 3D-printed artificial nose scaffold, a piece of cutting-edge technology that excites Maggie professionally, serves the purpose of criminal evasion and identity erasure. This subverts the medical ideal of restoration. Nadia’s breast augmentation likewise serves a transactional goal; she desires the surgery to become “irresistible” to Oleg, framing her body as an asset to be modified for a powerful man’s consumption. This reinforces the commodification of her body, established by the revelation of the sale of her kidney. For Maggie, whose career was built on reconstructive surgery for soldiers and children, participating in these procedures places her technical skills in the service of concealment and objectification, furthering the theme of The Corruption of Idealism.
These chapters systematically dismantle narrative reliability, creating a web of conflicting accounts that underscores the theme of Technology and the Elusive Nature of Truth. Each character presents a version of reality that serves a specific agenda, forcing Maggie into a state of uncertainty. Nadia first claims her kidney was donated to her brother before revealing the more harrowing truth that it was sold by her family. Yet even this confession is rendered suspect when Oleg warns Maggie that Nadia tells many stories and claims that “[n]one of them are true” (122). Similarly, Charles Lockwood presents a compelling argument that Oleg secretly funded WorldCures, but Oleg denies this with a convincing oath on his children’s lives. This structured unreliability extends to the AI griefbot, a technological facsimile of truth that offers Maggie a comforting but ultimately incomplete version of her husband. By layering these deceptions, the narrative establishes that truth is not a stable entity but a fluid concept manipulated for survival, power, and control.
The recurring references to “cutting-edge” and “state-of-the-art” technology function as a double-edged sword, symbolizing both progress and peril. The novel juxtaposes technologies that offer healing and control, showing them to be two sides of the same coin. The advanced surgical tools, like the AI-designed nose scaffold, represent the pinnacle of medical innovation, but they are used to help a criminal avoid accountability. This same level of sophistication appears in more sinister forms, such as the pervasive, unseen surveillance that allows Oleg’s team to bug Maggie’s room and use AI to select a wardrobe for her based on scraped internet data. The most illustrative example of this duality is the Marc griefbot. A product of advanced AI, it is designed to comfort but becomes a security liability that complicates Maggie’s grief. It blurs the line between memory and simulation, offering a flawed version of Marc that both helps and hinders her. Through its emphasis on technology, the novel illustrates how advanced technology, while promising innovation, can simultaneously be used to deceive, control, and distort reality.
Nadia emerges as a foil for Maggie, and their interactions highlight the vast disparities in their experiences of agency and sacrifice. Though both women are at the palace due to the influence of powerful men, the nature of their choices differs profoundly. Maggie accepts her lucrative contract from a position of relative privilege. In contrast, Nadia’s defining sacrifice—the sale of her kidney when she was 16—was a choice made to ensure her family’s basic survival. Her justification for this choice, that it saved three lives from probable starvation, challenges the moral framework from which Maggie operates and judges Nadia’s complicity in organ trafficking. This juxtaposition complicates any simple reading of their positions as victimhood, suggesting that agency is instead contingent on socioeconomic power and privilege.
Maggie’s discovery of the serpents and saints tattoo on Nadia’s thigh functions as a pivotal moment in the narrative, transforming Maggie’s understanding of the tattoo as a personal manifestation of Marc’s character into a sinister brand of ownership that connects Marc’s idealized past to a criminal underworld. For Maggie, the tattoo was exclusively Marc’s, a unique emblem from a drunken college night that represented youthful recklessness and individuality. Its sudden appearance on Nadia shatters this insular meaning. Nadia’s revelation that she was branded with the tattoo while unconscious during her kidney removal redefines it as a mark of violation by a surgeon that she calls “the Snake.” The symbol’s meaning is inverted: The serpent becomes a predator, and its halo a mocking indictment of false piety. This discovery retroactively taints Maggie’s perception of Marc and his humanitarian work, collapsing the distinction between his public heroism and the hidden, violent exploitation Nadia experienced. The tattoo becomes the clue in the novel’s central mystery, forcibly merging Maggie’s private grief with a global conspiracy.
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