Here One Moment

Here One Moment (2024), the 10th novel by international best-selling author Liane Moriarty, presents a tale in which passengers on a seemingly ordinary flight learn their exact times of death from a mysterious woman known as The Death Lady. This revelation sets the passengers on a journey grappling with fate, destiny, and their mortality as they decide how to live knowing when they will die. The book features the hallmarks of Moriarty’s writing: a narrative driven by multiple characters and a blend of humor, suspense, and meditations on philosophical issues.

This study guide uses the 2024 Kindle edition of the novel from Crown.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of alcohol and substance misuse, suicide, and suicidal ideation.

Plot Summary

The novel begins as passengers board a flight from Hobart Airport in Tasmania, Australia to Sydney. Later nobody will be able to recall a petite, middle-aged lady boarding the flight. The woman, later revealed to be Cherry Lockwood, stands and begins predicting the death of each passenger and their age at death.

She predicts the deaths of the following major characters: workaholic civil engineer Leo Voldik (workplace accident, age 43), cheerful nurse Sue O’Sullivan (pancreatic cancer, age 66), baby Timmy Binici (drowning, age 7), software engineer Ethan Chang (assault, age 30), bride Eve (intimate partner homicide, 25), and flight attendant Allegra (self-harm, age 28). The perspectives of these characters—and in Timmy’s case, his mother, Paula—are interspersed with Cherry’s revelations about her past and events after the flight. Cherry’s narration is from the first-person point of view. The other narratives are told in limited third-person point of view.

Ethan reveals that he was in Hobart at the funeral of one of his best friends, a grumpy young man named Harvey.

Paula is haunted by the prediction of her son Timmy’s death by drowning and begins obsessively taking him to swim lessons. Sue has dinner with a doctor friend who urges her to get tested for pancreatic cancer.

Ethan has a crush on his flatmate, Jasmine, an heiress.

Cherry continues to remember the past. Her mother, “Madame Mae,” was a fortune teller.

Allegra, who injured her back on the Hobart-Sydney flight, begins dating Jonny Summers, a handsome pilot who openly shows his affection and admiration for her. Allegra, who has had a bad break-up in the past, wants to proceed with caution.

Leo is under pressure from his boss, and his wife worries that he’ll regret his workaholic tendencies when he is old. His daughter Bridie, already spooked by Cherry’s prediction for her father, learns from a video that Kayla Halfpenny has died in a car accident at age 19, just as the Death Lady predicted.

Eve and her new husband Dom discover they are in debt. Neither has ever budgeted, and their wedding expenses and living expenses are adding up. Dom is worried about hurting Eve in his sleep due to the prediction that Eve will die at the hands of an intimate partner.

Cherry recalls growing up in suburban Sydney and how her father, an accountant, was struck by lightning and died.

Ethan dislikes Jasmine’s new boyfriend, Carter, who is entitled and jealous.

Two more predicted deaths occur as an elderly husband and wife, both doctors, die in quick succession. Cherry’s “victims” and their loved ones react with panic. Neve wants Leo to resign from his job and asks what he would do if he knew he was really going to die at 43. Leo says he would resign and move back to Tasmania to hang out with his family.

Paula and Eve meet at the funeral for the elderly doctors and bond over their shared experience. They set up a social media account to try to find Cherry. Meanwhile, Jasmine breaks up with Carter, calling him “stalkerish.”

Cherry recalls how she read the palm of someone named Suzanne, whom she met through her work, and told the woman to leave her marriage. She recalls meeting her first husband, David Smith, a cardiologist. They married a year later and were happy, but then David moved them across the country to Perth for his work.

Sue becomes ill and concludes she has the predicted pancreatic cancer, but it is just a virus. She and Max take up salsa dancing and she decides to cherish each moment of her life.

Allegra impulsively tells Jonny that she would like to become a pilot herself. When he invites her to his parents’ 40th wedding anniversary party, Allegra panics and says she doesn’t think the date will work. She falls and reinjures her back, which she had initially injured on the plane.

Suzanne, the woman whom Cherry advised to leave her marriage, calls Paula. She has seen the social media account and tells Paula the Death Lady is named Cherry.

Cherry recalls how in the past she returned to Sydney to find that her mother, Mae, was very ill. Mae told Cherry’s future and predicted happiness with the love of her life, who didn’t seem to be David, and that a little girl whose name began with B would give her a reason to live. Cherry and David divorced after David had an affair.

Allegra receives treatment for her back pain. Jonny is still encouraging her to enroll in flight school, and she considers it.

Allegra’s mother, who works in the insurance business, wonders if Cherry is an actuary due to the use of “I expect” in her predictions. She posts this tip on the social media account. Allegra tells Jonny she loves him and begins flight training.

Cherry reveals that she is indeed an actuary and became one after her mother died. She went to a dinner party and met her second husband, Ned Lockwood, an energetic high school math teacher. After they moved to Hobart, they befriended a couple named Jill and Bert.

Ethan meets Harvey’s sister, Lila, for a drink in Sydney. Lila brings her cousin Faith, and Ethan instantly falls in love with her. Carter spots Ethan and tries to attack him but is distracted by a seagull. Ethan gets away.

Cherry recalls how Ned had a heart attack and died. On the same day, Jill and Bert were in a fatal car accident. It was several months before Cherry had the heart to make the flight again to scatter Ned’s ashes. She didn’t eat or drink for hours before the flight, and made her predictions—based on her actuarial experience, not psychic powers—in a delirious state that she later could not remember. Back in Hobart, she befriended a woman named Mira who turned out to be Leo’s mother.

A man from the flight knocks on Cherry’s door and tells her that people are looking for her and that she ought to issue a public statement saying that she is not a psychic. Horrified to learn about her predictions, Cherry does so. Leo comes to visit his mother, and Cherry’s shout saves him from being crushed under an excavating machine.

Stephanie brings Paula to meet Cherry, who reassures her that she has no ability to see the future.

Leo and his family move back to Hobart, and Cherry befriends his daughter, Bridie, the girl that her mother predicted would save her after great loss. Tutoring Bridie in math brings Cherry happiness. An Epilogue shows Cherry cheering 17-year-old Timmy Binici as he wins his first gold medal at the Olympics.