After the death of her seismologist brother in the explosion of a Brazilian research station in Antarctica, a woman named Lee travels to Antarctica to meet her brother's co-workers and see the station for herself. All that potentially remains of him is his watch and an unidentified tibia. Lee tells everyone that she and her brother were close, which was true at one time. Their parents died when they were young and they lived together in a house in Somerville, MA in college. Then, her brother met a theater major named Eve at MIT and they got married the day they graduated. Eve moved in with Lee and her brother. Lee's brother became distracted by his PhD research and Lee and Eve became best friends. Lee admired Eve's taste and sense of adventure and started to carry around plays in her purse like Eve did. One day, Eve confessed she had a "secret." In Antarctica, Lee tries to ask the surviving scientists from her brother's station about her brother. They know very little. They say he didn't get along with anyone. It's mysterious that her brother died because everyone else from his section of the station survived. Eve told Lee about being abducted at knifepoint, held for ransom, and rescued when she was younger. She said she didn't know what happened to the man who did it after his seven-year prison sentence, but she later reveals that she kept track of him. He emerged in a hospital in critical condition, and she wanted to go visit him. She felt a need to show that she "won" — that her life turned out okay, despite what he did to her. Lee went with Eve to visit him. He was unconscious, and they drew on his face with lipstick. Eve asked Lee to leave and give her five minutes alone with him. She didn't come out of the hospital for almost an hour. Then she asked Lee to drop her off at the theater, which Lee did. Lee never saw her again. Eve had disappeared. In Antarctica, Lee wonders if someday she might disappear, too. Eve and her brother, the only people who would be able to explain Lee's absence to her loved ones, are already gone.