A journalist covering a story about a hotel comes in to his hotel room only to see a woman and her dog already inside of it. The woman explains that she had gotten in from the patio, though she assumed that the hotel room was hers. The journalist clarifies that the hotel room is indeed his, and he shows the woman and her dog out.

Throughout his stay at the hotel, the journalist continues to see the woman around, firstly catching her providing tomatoes to some of the hotel cooks. When he sits down to eat, she appears and sits down to join him. The man explains that he's at the hotel to write an article for a woman's magazine, and the woman explains that she got her tomatoes from a truck that had been involved in an accident on a bridge.

The man continues to take pictures around the hotel with the assistant manager. He later goes to Dolphin Beach and asks a woman selling shaved ice when he could go on a dolphin-watching boat. The woman explains to him that all three dolphins have been dead for a while, and therefore he cannot see them or take pictures of them.

Sitting at the top of a hill one night, the journalist is joined by the woman once more. The journalist talks about what he writes about, and the woman talks about the happenings around the hotel, including the death of the three dolphins. They both talk about their children, and the woman mentions that the journalist looks a lot like her stepson.

In the swimming pool one day, the journalist swims a few laps, and the woman arrives to cheer him on as he does. Later, they sit in the hotel library so that the journalist can take pictures of her. They then sit together in the hotel library for some time longer, during which the woman tells the journalist more about her stepson and what happened to him. She then talks about the manuscript she had written a long time ago and how a hunchbacked woman had allegedly stolen it from her and published it herself.

The journalist reads the manuscript and continues his days at the hotel as normal, eating and swimming. Once, the journalist swims a few laps while the woman watches, and she asks him to conclude with a butterfly stroke. When he does, the man sees that the woman has vanished—nowhere to be found. When the journalist asks around for her whereabouts, he finds out that she indeed checked out that morning.