Dannie aces her job interview at Wachtell and predicts that David will propose to her at dinner that night.

David proposes to Dannie at the Rainbow Room, telling her his love goes beyond the alignment of their five-year plans.

Dannie wakes in an unfamiliar Brooklyn apartment on December 15, 2025, and discovers she is living with a man named Aaron Gregory.

Dannie wakes back in her own apartment and understands she has experienced a premonition of a future she never planned.

Four and a half years pass with Dannie and David repeatedly postponing their wedding without ever going through with it.

On a double date, Dannie discovers Bella's new boyfriend Greg is Aaron, the same man from her premonition.

Panicked by the premonition's reality, Dannie convinces David to stop delaying and they agree on a December wedding date.

During a Hamptons vacation, Bella tells Dannie she thinks she is pregnant, and a drugstore test confirms it.

A doctor's appointment reveals that Bella has stage three ovarian cancer and was never pregnant.

Bella undergoes surgery to remove her reproductive organs, and Dannie is officially listed as her next of kin.

Frustrated by Dannie's controlling behavior during treatment, Bella tells her to stop attending chemotherapy appointments.

David confronts Dannie and tells her he knows she doesn't love him the way he deserves, and the engagement ends.

Aaron and Bella reveal they bought and fully decorated the Dumbo apartment as a surprise gift for Dannie.

Bella dies, and her closest friends hold a rooftop memorial on the exact date Dannie saw in her premonition.

Back in the Dumbo apartment after the memorial, Dannie realizes her intense feeling for Aaron was grief for Bella, not romantic love.

Dannie Kohan's carefully planned life is upended on the night of her engagement when she experiences a premonition of a radically different future with a stranger named Aaron Gregory. For four and a half years she ignores the vision, but when Aaron appears as her best friend Bella's boyfriend, she scrambles to prevent that future from arriving. Her plans collapse entirely when Bella is diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer, stripping away every illusion Dannie has built about control and certainty. As Bella's illness progresses, Dannie's engagement falls apart and she is forced to move into the very apartment she tried so hard to avoid. When Bella dies and the premonition's final scene plays out exactly as she saw it, Dannie discovers its true meaning: the overwhelming feeling she experienced was not love for Aaron but profound grief for the best friend who was the greatest love of her life.

The core story of Dannie's premonition, Bella's illness, and the truth about love.

After the premonition, Dannie visits therapist Dr. Christine to understand what she saw and prevent it from coming true.

While running through the Dumbo neighborhood in search of the premonition's apartment, Dannie unexpectedly runs into Aaron.

Aaron invites Dannie to tour the Dumbo apartment he and Bella are considering buying together.

Dannie exaggerates the Dumbo apartment's flaws to Bella over the phone, hoping to stop her from buying it.

At a dinner with Bella, Dannie defends her relationship with David in purely practical terms when Bella asks if she truly loves him.

On a Hamptons beach walk, Aaron and Dannie talk about Bella, and Dannie realizes he is already deeply in love with her.

Aaron learns about the supposed pregnancy and is overjoyed, while Bella starts buying baby supplies and painting the nursery.

Aaron calls Dannie to say the doctor's visit brought bad news, and Bella reveals it is cancer rather than a miscarriage.

Dannie calls Bella's well-connected father and arranges an urgent appointment with the city's top oncologist.

During Bella's surgery, Aaron takes Dannie to the rooftop terrace of a nearby building he is currently designing.

Managing partner Aldridge calls Dannie to his office and offers her the lead associate role on a major new case.

Bella gives Dannie the eye chart print as an early birthday gift — the exact print Dannie recognized from her premonition apartment.

Dannie travels to California with Aldridge for client meetings and confides her personal struggles to him at the hotel bar.

Dannie buys the first wedding dress she tries on and immediately receives Aaron's call that Bella's latest test results are bad.

Dannie goes to Bella's estranged mother's hotel and persuades her to return to Bella's apartment to be with her daughter.

These events trace the secondary web of choices, relationships, and discoveries running alongside the novel's main plot. Dannie's attempts to understand and outmaneuver her premonition — from visiting her therapist to seeking out the Dumbo apartment and steering Bella away from buying it — reveal how desperately she wants to hold onto her planned future. The Hamptons vacation and Aaron's deepening love for Bella mark a turning point in Dannie's understanding of what she stands to lose. Bella's false pregnancy and subsequent cancer diagnosis arrive as a shock that derails every plan Dannie has, from the wedding to her career, which takes an unexpected leap forward just as everything else falls apart. The final events of this pool trace Dannie's quieter acts of care — buying a dress, flying home early, persuading an absent mother to return — as the people around her step up or fall short in the face of grief.

The relationships and choices that shaped the path to Bella's death.

In the premonition, Dannie discovers an engagement ring on her finger that is not the one David just gave her.

Dr. Christine suggests the premonition may not have been a dream but something unexplainable, like a genuine vision of the future.

Aaron acknowledges Dannie's cool first reception of him and asks if they can start fresh and become friends.

At dinner with Bella, Dannie inadvertently reveals she actually loves the Dumbo apartment by arguing passionately for its merits.

Dannie tells Bella that her discomfort with Aaron may be jealousy over having to share her best friend with someone new.

During an intimate moment with David, Dannie recognizes a deep emotional distance between them that she has been refusing to admit.

Dr. Shaw tells Dannie that remission is rare for Bella's cancer and that treatment aims to contain it rather than cure it.

Bella confirms to Dannie that she secretly bought the Dumbo apartment despite being talked out of it, promising she will never live there.

Aaron comforts Dannie after her fight with Bella, telling her that love has value even when it cannot be counted on forever.

Dannie returns to therapist Dr. Christine and talks openly about her brother Michael's death for the first time in years.

Aaron proposes to Bella, calls her his soulmate, and tells her he is fated to be with her regardless of the cancer.

Bella tells Dannie plainly that she doesn't believe Dannie has the passionate, whole love she is capable of and deserves.

Dannie and Aaron kiss in the newly decorated Dumbo apartment, and Dannie briefly forgets all of her grief and pain.

In the apartment closet, Dannie finds the dress from the premonition and a handwritten note from Bella asking her to wear it.

After the memorial, Dannie finds a photo confirming Bella's memory of the beach house blue awning, then unexpectedly meets Dr. Shaw at a deli.

This pool collects the pivotal revelations and emotional turning points that quietly rewrite Dannie's understanding of her own life. From the first unsettling clues in the premonition — the wrong ring, the unfamiliar apartment — to the slow erosion of her certainties about love and control, each event marks a moment when Dannie is forced to see what she would rather ignore. Her inadvertent confession about loving the Dumbo apartment, her recognition of emotional distance from David, and her first honest conversation about her brother's death all track her painful movement toward self-knowledge. The confrontation with Bella's mortality brings the sharpest clarity, dissolving the comfortable roles the two women have performed for each other and forcing long-avoided truths to the surface. By the end, Dannie has moved from a woman who believed the future was something to be planned and defended to one who can stand in an uncertain present and let it be.

The key discoveries and emotional shifts that changed how Dannie sees herself and her world.