Liana is a beautiful and extroverted young girl who is adventuring in Kenya. She imposes upon a couple that she knows as a friend of a friend of a friend, and she stays in their house for a while. Liana enjoys the area and swims in the nearby creek every afternoon. One day, however, she takes her afternoon swim a little too far out and realizes the current is much stronger than she had realized. She has also just cut her foot open upon a rock in the creek, and she must now get herself out of the current before being swept out into the Indian Ocean. Back at the house, her hosts are fairly worried after Liana doesn't return before dark. But suddenly she shows up, shivering and covered in mud. Liana gets in a hot shower, and the couple help bandage her foot. She doesn't tell them about her near-death experience, feeling as if the event has aged her many years, giving her maturity and a sense of what privacy entails. Liana grows up into a practical and civilized woman with a normal job in marketing and a marriage that ends in a divorce. She collects near-death experiences after that afternoon in Kenya, almost getting hit by vehicles and nearly drowning. She never tells anyone about her first near-death experience, though, until one day, when she is 37. She brings a guy up to the rooftop of the apartment she recently moved into. They are at her apartment building's Fourth of July party, and Liana sits close to the edge, prompting her date to ask if she is steady—which Liana brushes off. She tells him her story, and then improbably, just shifting her hips with discomfort, she loses her balance and tips backward off the roof. In her fatal fall, she finally realizes what it is that these near-death experiences have taught her—that at some point there is no "almost", that at some point death will come.