Summary

In the prologue, Lola’s former boss Clive’s grandmother used to tell him a ghost story when he was bored. In the story, the dead had a contest. The winners got “to walk among the living for exactly three minutes,” doing whatever they pleased for this brief amount of time (3). Lola thought about the story often. She remembered the day Clive told her and her colleagues the story during a meeting when she still worked as an editor for Modern Psychology, “a scientific periodical” (6). Not long later, she and her colleagues all lost their jobs when “the magazine folded” (6). Now none of this mattered because Clive was dead. Believing death was “the ultimate lubricant for truth,” Lola wished she had listened to Clive more closely “that day in the conference room” (7).

In Chapter 1, Lola went out for dinner in Chinatown with...