Twelve years later, in December 2022, Carrie lives in Devon with her husband, Robin, and their six-year-old twins, Raffy and Maeve. That night, she googles chronic lung disease for Raffy, who has the condition and had a minor asthma attack after the school nativity play. She also messages her sister, Maya, about their father, whose Alzheimer’s has progressed, requiring him to move into a residential care home.

After a difficult evening managing Raffy’s breathing, Carrie finds Robin in his office with a new camera lens for his astronomy hobby. He tells her the International Space Station will be visible the next night and suggests they take the children to watch it. The conversation turns to Carrie’s career; she reveals that her General Medical Counsel (GMC) re-registration and license to practice have been confirmed and she will be returning to work after six months of supervised reorientation followed by six months of specialist practice, after which her practice level will be decided. She is thrilled, especially since an old mentor, Yanika Hatziz, has offered her a chance to shadow her in Sweden. Robin is supportive but expresses concern, noting that she once told him never to let her go back to surgery if she ever changed her mind. He agrees to celebrate her news, grabbing a bottle of “bubbles.”

The narrative flashes back to London in 2014, four years after Johan’s abduction. Carrie, now 31 and an ST4 junior surgical registrar at the Royal Marsden working in esophageal cancer, is helping organize a fundraising gala to buy a Da Vinci XI surgical robot. She notices a man at a table hosted by a wealthy philanthropist, Andrew Heynes. The man—Heynes’s philanthropic adviser—later helps Carrie with a malfunctioning card machine at the donations table after her consultant Kenny is called away; her friend Dell watches the entire exchange. He is charmed by her passion for her work and sends her a letter the following week asking her to dinner. His name is Robin Carghill.

They begin dating, and Robin is transparent about a recent bad breakup, which makes him wary of deception. Carrie is equally direct, explaining that her first husband had a double life. Though she is cautious, she tells him she healed from the trauma by creating a structured plan to process her feelings while focusing on work. Their relationship progresses, and after six months, Carrie tells Robin she loves him. He immediately proposes, and she accepts, wanting a proper husband who is exactly who he says he is.

Back in the present, Robin returns from the shed with a bottle of crémant to celebrate Carrie’s news.

Later that night, after celebrating with Robin and booking her flights to Stockholm, Carrie begins searching for accommodation. She will attend a conference for hosts of Roof, a holiday rental company that she and Robin use to rent out their guest property, while in Sweden. While browsing, she idly looks at properties in the wider archipelago and is struck by a listing for a seaside cabin. She zooms in on the host’s profile picture and is stunned to realize it is her first husband, Johan Kullberg: “The man I believed to be my one great love. It’s him” (31).

Overcome with shock, Carrie stays up all night. She breaks a promise to herself and googles Johan, discovering he is now a qualified architect in Stockholm with a partner and a son. A 2016 Swedish newspaper article shows him thin and ill-looking, reporting that he apparently flew back to Sweden to start his life over, though how he escaped is not stated. The realization that Johan somehow got out and never contacted her unleashes a fresh wave of anger and humiliation; she wonders in anguish how his parents could also have failed to reach out. Sickened by her own actions but unable to stop, she stares at his photos until her children wake up. The next day, she goes through the motions of her life in a daze, consumed by thoughts of Johan and unable to connect with anything around her.

A few days after discovering Johan is alive, Carrie is on the phone with her sister, Maya, who is now a therapist in Colorado. Maya insists that Carrie cannot go to Stockholm, warning her that being in the same city as Johan will be too destabilizing. She reminds Carrie that before Johan betrayed her, Carrie “loved him like he was the last man on earth” (41). She points out that Johan, as a fellow Roof host, might even be at the conference. The thought had not occurred to Carrie, and she is horrified by the possibility. She agrees to cancel the trip.

Carrie’s mother, Adelina Ghali, took a different view when Carrie called her earlier, arguing—in words Carrie relays to Maya—that meeting Yanika is far more important than a tiny chance of bumping into Johan. After her call with Maya, Carrie cancels her flights and the hotel Robin booked for her.

The next evening, the house descends into chaos. The twins, Raffy and Maeve, are unruly, leading to a spilled cup of tea that stains a new rug, a shattered cup, and a bleeding foot for Raffy. Overwhelmed and having not had a break in six years, Carrie sends the children to bed with Robin. She steps on another piece of the broken cup, injuring her foot. Frustrated and exhausted, she finds a delegate list for the Roof conference online. When she searches for Johan’s name and finds he is not registered, she immediately rebooks her flights and hotel. She is going to Stockholm.

The narrative returns to January 2010, before Carrie met Johan. At 26, she is a core surgical trainee at the Royal London hospital, awaiting the results of her registrar exams. One day, an elderly woman named Deniz is brought into A&E after being hit by a motorcycle. Johan, who witnessed the accident, is at the hospital with Deniz’s belongings; police need to confirm her identity before the belongings can be released. Their eyes meet in a corridor.

Deniz’s condition deteriorates rapidly. Her chest drain, inserted by an A&E registrar, has slipped, and her lung collapses. With no one available to help, Carrie performs an emergency finger thoracostomy to save her life. During the crisis, the police officer and Johan enter the room. Carrie, enraged by the intrusion and the lack of support, shouts at the officer to get out.

After Deniz is stabilized, Johan defends Carrie’s actions to both the officer and her colleagues, stating she was under immense pressure and saved the woman’s life. As he leaves, he gives Carrie his name and number, asking the hospital to call him if Deniz, who has no family visiting, asks for him. Her friend and colleague Dell witnesses the entire charged exchange. Later, talking to her sister Maya, Carrie admits she feels a powerful and unprecedented need to see Johan again.

Carrie becomes consumed with thoughts of Johan. In a theater coffee room between cases, her friend Dell encourages her to contact him, arguing there are no rules against it since he is not a patient or relative. Carrie, a stickler for rules, refuses, fearing it could compromise her job.

The next day, she finds Johan sitting outside the hospital. He has been visiting Deniz, who has had no other visitors and asked a nurse to call him. He is Swedish and works several jobs—including as a translator, painter, scuba instructor, and, as he confides to Carrie as a sign he likes her, an ass model for a jeans brand—to support his main passion as a marine archaeologist. They talk for a long time, and Carrie tells him about her ambition to be a surgeon and her dilemma over taking a fellowship in either Johannesburg or Indonesia. He listens intently, and the connection between them deepens. As she is called back to the ward, they stand close in the lift lobby. He asks if there are rules preventing them from seeing each other, and she confirms there are. The tension is palpable, but before anything more can happen, her beeper goes off again and she walks away.

Johan does not return to the hospital, and weeks turn into months. Carrie learns she has ranked 11th nationally in her registrar interviews, but the achievement feels hollow without being able to share it with him. She becomes lonely and despondent.

In May, four months after they met, she sees him at a Sainsbury’s near the hospital. He tells her he was always going to come back for her but was advised by a friend in the NHS to wait a few months to avoid getting her into professional trouble. Without hesitation, Carrie abandons her plans and goes back to his nearby flat. The physical attraction is immediate and overwhelming, and they fall into bed together. Johan tells her, “Come back tonight, Carrie Cole. And the next night. And the one after that,” before admitting, “I need you” (92).

Johan suggests they go on a proper date, and Carrie impulsively suggests a scuba diving lesson, which he teaches. Earlier that day she assists in a traumatic Whipple’s procedure where the patient nearly dies from a massive bleed; Johan’s email confirming the dive booking arrives while she is still in theater. At the pool that evening, Carrie overcomes her fear of breathing underwater and finds she trusts Johan completely. After the lesson, they go to a Japanese restaurant, their first official date out in the world together.

Three weeks later, Carrie introduces Johan to her formidable activist mother, Adelina Ghali, who is immediately charmed by him. Johan tells Adelina about an upcoming six-week marine archaeology job in Myanmar. They get along well, and after Adelina leaves, Johan remarks on the intensity of the “Cole women.”

A few weeks later, Johan leaves for a six-day job surveying a potential oil rig site in the North Sea. He warns Carrie that communication will be difficult. Despite this, when she doesn’t hear from him, she begins to panic. Her distress affects her work, and she makes multiple errors: prescribing Augmentin to a penicillin-allergic patient, failing to send a hernia patient to scan, and missing a rota meeting. Her mentor, Yanika Hatziz, reprimands her for all three.

When Johan finally calls, Carrie impulsively tries to end the relationship, claiming she needs to focus on her career. He calmly intuits that her distress is because he didn’t call. He explains that the rig had no personal phone or internet access and sends her a screenshot of his phone, showing a full page of unsent messages he tried to send her every night, each one reading, “I miss you tonight” (111). Overwhelmed, Carrie is speechless as he tells her he loves her: “I think about you all day. All night. You’re it. Everything” (111). He later meets her at the hospital and proposes they take a holiday together in Thailand during a two-week break in his upcoming Myanmar job, as he is unwilling to be apart from her for six weeks.