Here One Moment (spoilers and ending explained) | Liane Moriarty
This post has spoilers for Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty. If you are looking for a spoiler-free review, head back to the main page for an un-spoiled review.
Are you looking to find out how Here One Moment ended and get into this long and unique book? If you’re like me, you didn’t really know what to expect. I really loved Here One Moment, but I can see why many didn’t. This is definitely not a psychological thriller, or even a mystery. With Moriarty’s subtle but fun humor shining through and a unique story, this is a book that begs to be discussed. Let’s get into the spoilers!
What happens on the plane?
A woman named Cherry is seated on a flight which should have been like any other flight. There is a delay, passengers are restless and ready to get to their destinations, but there is the general liveliness that comes from transporting to a new destination. Moriarty describes Cherry by her ordinariness. She’s a woman on a plane with no distinguishing features that would make others pay attention to her. She’s not tall, pregnant, dressed in fancy clothing, emotional, or chatty. In fact, Moriarty describes her as “not anything that anyone will later recall.”
Cherry spots a woman in a bridal gown sitting near here and she suddenly goes into a sort of fugue state. It turns out it is the very same wedding dress Cherry donated to a charity shop. In the midst of this mental health crisis, Cherry stands up and begins to point at different passengers, predicting their age and cause of death. How strange!
“I expect catastrophic stroke at age seventy-two,” is her first prediction. But it is followed by dozens of others. Passengers react in various ways—anger, confusion, humor. But none of them can quite shake it from their minds.
Who are the key characters we follow?
We meet Leo who is a forty-two year-old civil engineer, stressing because he will miss his daughter’s school play due to the flight delay. Leo is the only person that notices Cherry before she begins her predictions. When she gets to Leo, she predicts “I expect a workplace accident, age forty-three.” Troubling since Leo is already forty-two. Sitting beside Leo (and who he is steadfastly trying to ignore because they are chatty) are married couple Max and Sue. They spend a significant amount of time calling their children and grandchildren, much to Leo’s annoyance. Sue is a nurse and Max is a plumber. The predictions state that Max will die of heart disease at eighty-four, and Sue will die from pancreatic cancer at age sixty-six. Sue does not like this, and Max tells her not to worry though he secretly worried himself.
A twenty-nine year-old named Ethan is traveling back from his friend’s funeral. Were they friends, though? Ethan didn’t seem to like Harvey all that much. Ethan is in love with his flat mate, Jasmine. And he is predicted to die at age thirty from assault. That is next year! Meanwhile Eve and Dom are the newlyweds that set off Cherry’s string of predictions. Eve is fidgeting from the discomfort of wearing her (Cherry’s) wedding dress and fancy underwear on the flight, when she hears her prediction. Intimate partner violence at the age of twenty-five. That gets awkward quickly!
Paula is a thirty-six year-old attorney who is currently away from her career while she raises her young children, Timmy and Willow. Paula is predicted to die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at eighty-four. But Cherry isn’t done. She predicts Willow will die at the age of 103 (what parent wouldn’t want to hear that?) and that Timmy will die from drowning at the age of seven (oof). This prediction causes a lot of stress and anger from surrounding passengers. The flight attendant Allegra does her best to calm the passengers down and deal with Cherry. Allegra is by all accounts from other passengers strikingly beautiful. But Allegra is hiding deep seeded insecurities from comments made about her race and appearance growing up. To the horror of all who hear, Cherry predicts she will die from self-harm at the age of twenty-eight. The day of the flight is Allegra’s twenty-eighth birthday. Yikes!
Do the predictions come true?
When a young woman who was on the flight named Kayla does indeed die from a car accident at the age of nineteen as Cherry predicted, the news goes viral. Kayla’s friend was filming her while driving just before a car crashes into them, taking their lives. Ever since the prediction, Kayla drove extra cautiously. Later, Cherry ponders if her prediction caused Kayla’s death; she may not have been at that intersection if she were going quicker. When an elderly couple who were also on the flight die one day apart, everyone begins to panic that Cherry’s predictions will come true.
What about everyone else, though? It’s hard to say if the three deaths are coincidences or, as Cherry’s mother would say, an example that “fate can’t be fought.” Coincidence or not, the others are worried, especially the ones such as Leo and Allegra who have short predicted life spans ahead of them. But what about Eve who just married a man who may be the cause of her death? Or Paula’s son who is predicted to die of drowning at age seven? Should she keep him away from water at all costs, just in case?
After Leo’s prediction, his wife pressures him to quit his job. At first Leo thinks it is only due to the predicted death in a workplace accident, but in reality she knows Leo hates his job. She suggests they move to Tasmania for a year. Eventually, Leo gets over the fear of losing his income and he reconnects with a long-lost friend Rod who wants to move there as well. He sees how he could be happy. Just before the move, Cherry sees Leo in her friend Mira’s backyard—it turns out that Leo is Mira’s son. As Leo recognizes Cherry, she sees the excavator in the yard start to topple and shouts for him to move. Leo narrowly escapes death. So perhaps fate can be fought, after all?
Eve and Dom struggled in the early months of their marriage, in part because they had never learned to manage their finances. But also because of the prediction that Eve would die of intimate partner violence. Dom proposes breaking up and not speaking until after Eve’s twenty-fifth birthday, when they can remarry. The breakup lasts nine hours and Eve says it is the worst nine hours of her life. However, this also made them both appreciate their relationship. Eve does not die of intimate partner violence. Instead, the couple prioritizes learning to communicate effectively. Let’s hope this is the sign of a long, lovely marriage.
Ethan finally begins to admit he has feelings for his roommate Jasmine, though he can’t get his late friend Harvey out of his mind. When Jasmine and her boyfriend Carter break up, Ethan thinks this may be his chance. But despite spending time together, Jasmine continues to have Ethan firmly in the friendzone. When she leaves town to go to Europe for a few months and asks Ethan to feed her fish, he has the first flash of annoyance at Jasmine. One day he goes to meet Harvey’s sister and her friend for a drink. As soon as he sees the friend, he hears Harvey in his head urging him to connect with her. Perhaps Jasmine isn’t his person. Her ex Carter happens to be at the same bar, and he belligerently tries to pick a fight with Ethan. But Harvey’s sister and her friend pull him away, and a seagull intervenes before the ex can catch him. Perhaps Harvey saved him from dying in a bar fight, after all?
One night Sue wakes up incredibly sick and in pain. She is certain the death lady was right, and she is in the early stage of pancreatic cancer. However, it turns out it was merely a virus. Sue is embarrassed she overreacted, but Max is grateful. They had conversations about life and death and what they wanted to use their time for. Max takes her to sign up for salsa lessons and they love them. Sue does not die of pancreatic cancer, but the prediction helped her and Max to prioritize their health and cherish the time while they have it.
Allegra is worried about the prediction. She doesn’t think she is depressed, but when suffers from a back injury, she understands how easy it is for pain to lead to suicidal ideation. She is in a semi-relationship with the pilot from the flight, Jonny. But Allegra holds back with him, and he eventually breaks it off. She realizes that she wants to make changes in her life. She decides to go to school to become a pilot. She texts Jonny that she loves him, and he reciprocates. She does not die by taking her own life.
How does it end?
Cherry is the central character here in many ways, though her story is about her past. Cherry had a man she loved who died tragically young. She went on to marry another man who she realizes loves her body, but not her. Eventually, he moves them to Perth and their marital problems increase. When Cherry’s mother dies, she returns to Perth to discover he has been having an affair with a busty coworker who loves scuba diving as much as he does. Cherry divorces him. Eventually, she meets a man named Ned who is the love of her life. They have a great marriage, but Cherry worries about a vision she had that Ned and their best friends Jill and Bert would all die on the same day.
Cherry and Ned are on vacation when he falls asleep on the flight and never wakes up. Back home, their best friends are struck by a careless driver and die. This all happens right before the infamous flight where Cherry begins predicting deaths. In fact, Cherry has her husband’s ashes with her on the flight, bringing them home. When she sees Eve in her former wedding dress, she snaps and begins doing the predictions without realizing it. Is Cherry a psychic like her mother? Not at all. She’s an actuary, we learn. She processes data to make informed conjecture about health and life expectancy, which is how she was able to be so accurate with those on the plane. However, she also sees this as a way to help people avoid their fate. Fate can be fought, in Cherry’s opinion. And the stories of the others on the plane prove that. They become more vigilant about their health and relationships. They pay attention to what they truly want, and that allows some to avoid what may have been.
What about the ending? I mentioned that the final scene made me so happy. Did you notice I didn’t update on Paula yet? Let’s get back to her story. Remember that Cherry predicted Paula’s son Timmy would die from drowning at age seven. Paula can’t shake the prediction, so she puts Timmy in swimming lessons. She develops a habit of writing down that Timmy won’t die hundreds of times per day. Her husband worries about her, and they talk about seeing someone about OCD. One day while having lunch with her friend Stephanie, Paula receives a text from Eve revealing Cherry’s identity. Stephanie is surprised. She knows Cherry; she and her husband Ned with best friends with her own parents, Jill and Bert, who died tragically the year before. On the same day as Ned. Interesting how it all comes around?
The epilogue is over a decade later. Cherry is watching television where a seventeen year-old is being interviewed about his first time competing in the upcoming Olympics. His name is Timothy, and he says he learned to swim before he could even walk. His mother put him in swimming lessons after a fortune teller predicted he would drown at the age of seven. That woman is Paula. Timmy did nearly drown on a school trip at the age of seven, it turns out. He fell off a platform into the sea and only survived because he was such a strong swimmer. At home, Cherry cheers as Timmy goes on to win the gold medal in his first Olympics.
What did I think?
The ending charmed me. The whole book charmed me! Cherry ended up being such a warm character. Her story had funny moments and sad moments, but ultimately she looks back at a wonderful life. She’s grateful for how many years she got to have Ned, and she learns to focus on that and not on her grief that she lost him. Her predictions make a difference in so many lives. Would they have avoided their fates without her? It’s hard to say. Many of them wouldn’t, it seems. The lesson isn’t that we need to know what might happen to avoid it. The lesson is that we never truly know what can happen, so we need to live our lives and find happiness as often as we can. We don’t know when we will lose a loved one, or have an accident, or fall sick. But there are many things we can do to use the most of the limited time each of us gets on Earth. It’s lovely, if you think about it!
