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Walter goes over security footage with Raphael, the hotel’s general manager, though they don’t find anything useful.

The next night, Alkaitis and Prevant have dinner together. Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy New York financier who owns the hotel and visits a few times each year, arrives a few hours later and doesn’t see the graffiti. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive kept awake by financial worries, is the only guest to see the message before it’s covered up. In the middle of the night, someone scrawls a threatening message, “ why don’t you swallow broken glass,” on the lobby’s huge glass wall, which thoroughly disturbs Walter, the night manager, and Vincent, who is working as the hotel’s bartender. The narrative skips ahead to Spring 2005, at the Hotel Caiette, a luxury resort on a remote tip of Vancouver Island. Paul sees Charlie’s ghost in multiple clubs. Paul, Vincent, and Melissa go out dancing. Paul arrives at Vincent and her friend Melissa’s sketchy apartment.

Paul also blames Vincent for his parents’ divorce, since it was Paul’s father’s affair with Vincent’s mother and the birth of Vincent that instigated the divorce. Paul had come to town to help out in the aftermath of Vincent’s mother’s recent drowning. Vincent had just gotten in trouble for graffitiing her school’s window in Port Hardy, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Before arriving in Vancouver, Paul remembers the last time he saw Vincent, in 1995, when she was 13. Paul flees Toronto for Vancouver, where his younger stepsister, Vincent, is living with her childhood friend, Melissa. The next time Paul runs into Baltica, he offers them bad ecstasy, which causes the overdose death of the band’s keyboardist, Charlie Wu. He’s enchanted by the band’s lead singer and violinist, Annika, though she rejects his advances. One night, Paul goes to a nightclub and meets a band called Baltica.

Paul, an aspiring composer, is recently out of rehab for drug addiction and struggling to make friends at college in Toronto. Snippets of her life flash before her eyes. The novel begins in December 2018 with a series of connected fragments of speech depicting the moments leading up to Vincent’s death as she falls overboard from the Neptune Cumberland into the stormy sea below.