Cherry Lockwood is the daughter of a psychic who grew up to become an actuary. Her age isn’t specified, but she seems to be in her sixties. She is attractive, with shoulder-length gray hair and a good figure. She likes popular culture and references celebrities such as Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, and Brad Pitt.

Cherry has had two great loves and two marriages—one bad and one good. As the novel begins, she is mourning the recent death of not just her beloved husband, Ned Lockwood, but their two best friends, Jill and Bert. In her grief, she allows herself to become severely dehydrated before her flight from Hobart, Tasmania, where she lives, to mainland Australia. As a result, she begins calling upon her actuarial experience to name the age and cause of death for the other passengers. While a few of the predictions come true, most do not—in part because the “victims” change their ways. Several narrowly escape their fates.

Despite her psychic predictions, Cherry proves to rely on logic, not telepathy. Counterintuitively, she questions psychic phenomena, and growing up was skeptical about her mother’s ability to tell fortunes. Through her, the novel explores The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny.