The book starts with a prologue, putting out that it's been a long time since this has all happened and that this was the first writing venture he's ever felt confident in doing, proceeding to preface the fact that things like anxiety and depression run in his family. He goes on to include the fact that he hides a lot of the worst of his feelings, most of which stem from guilt, loneliness, and self-worth issues, most of which stem from many of the events in this book. He quips that you'll know exactly which ones when you get there and also mentions that despite the way he consistently hides how he feels and his incredible acting ability, he still always makes an effort not to lie to people with the things that are considered important.

 A good few beginning chapters of the book detail much of his childhood, a lot of which revolves around his relationship with his brother, Aodhfin, growing up together in the city of Galway within the Hooker County of Ireland. In fact, it starts at the birth of his brother, detailing how his parents, due to their hardcore Christian values, refused to abort or give him for adoption despite the fact that they adamantly only wanted one child. He disdainfully notes how taking care of the child apparently wasn't among their values and thoroughly explains the fact that the only times his parents bothered taking care of Aodhfin were to get him to stop bothering them. This caused Aodhfin to grow up feeling constantly like a terrible burden to everyone but his brother.

 John details how excited he was and how much time he spent with his brother. Everything from his brother being unable to pronounce his real name, Dubhlainn, leading to him being called John and eventually Jojo, to abandoning the ideas of after-school functions and hanging out with people so he could come home and be with his brother to reading him to sleep every single night that he could, all the way through high school. It's openly stated that reading to his brother so often was one of the biggest reasons he decided to major in English to become a teacher. This was much to the dismay of his best friend Killian O'Connell, a wannabe smooth-talker who John could never really tell whose feelings he cared about most. He did state that Killian was always a loyal friend and would, quote, "abandon a girl he's in the middle of fucking to pick me up in a snowstorm if I had no ride."

 Despite that, he notes that he always disliked when Killian went after the girl he liked, a girl named Julietta Rorick, although she'd always very harshly reject Killian. He openly admits that he was always too nervous to go talk to her himself, or anyone for that matter, until one day where he saw her reading a familiar book. He went over and talked to her about it casually, not making any major moves, and came out with a 1-on-1 offer to help her with schoolwork, much to Killian's surprise. This quickly became a serious relationship, which John's dear friend was clearly not happy with. Whether he was jealous of simply felt a little abandoned for someone else was unclear to John.

 Meanwhile, Aodhfin's intellect spiraled out of control and he quickly began learning all manner of subjects at a rapid pace almost naturally. He eventually got a laptop computer, on which he began teaching himself how to code, quickly finding ways around code which lead to him learning to hack, which eventually lead to him becoming a vigilante hacker on the dark web. As much as John was concerned for his safety in such an endeavor, he knew his brother was one of the smartest people he'd ever heard of before and held faith that he'd be able to protect himself.

 When it was time for John to leave for college, he made a rather sizable decision. He went back on his word to Killian to go to a university in London to study acting with his friend and instead decided to go to National University of Ireland Galway to major in English Literature, that way he could stay with both his girlfriend and continue to be close enough to his brother to spend frequent time with him. Killian strongly voiced his feeling of betrayal and that was the last they ever spoke. John didn't let that keep him down, continuing to read to his brother as much as possible, despite their ages and Aodhfin being able to very easily read at a college level, as well proposing and getting engaged to Julie a little over halfway through college.

  Immediately after college, John got married to Julie and moved to a city south of Portland, Oregon to be a teacher in the US. He, through numerous long conversations, convinced Aodhfin to move out on his own as well. Aodhfin reluctantly decided to move to New York to be better in the loop about wall street affairs and corruption and proceeded to hack government systems to get everyone proper citizenship clearance to immigrate to the United States.

 Roughly a year after that, with Aodhfin being on the verge of 19 and John having just turned 24, everything changed all at once. One morning, during class, John was teaching at the front of the room as usual and then just... everything went black in one big, loud blast of energy. Well over half the school collapsed. John's classroom was not part of that, he woke up against the wall bleeding from the head to see a pile of desks to one side of the room and several students digging out dead bodies. 3 of the 35 students had been crushed by their desks in the blast and one of them had impacted the wall directly on his head. Collecting broken thoughts in a haze of confusion, John elected to get the fuck out of there and leave the bodies before anything else happened.

 The only radio broadcast on any station now was confirmation of nuclear detonations all along the west coast sector of North America, from the very coast all the way through the mountain time zone. One of those warheads had gone off just barely out of range of that school and everyone was already soaking up radiation. The class left to the edge of town where they all holed up in a blown-out bookstore and tried to survive.

 Following that are the details of a dull day of barricading doors, gathering supplies and helping the wounded. John now had to watch in real-time as his class, his responsibility, the young, bright lives he was entrusted with, slowly slipped into despair and it began to eat away at him inside harder than anything else. Luckily, the world slowed down for a moment long enough for him to search some of the other nearby stores for supplies. Quickly, the group became relatively well-stocked on all the important stuff... That made them a target.

 Late one night, John noticed looters were trying to break in. Very few of them were awake at the time, it was only him, the class genius and a sweet young girl who was too scared to sleep. John grabbed a metal pipe that had been blown off the back walls of the bookstore and waited to see if he couldn't tail the looters. Sure enough, they broke in, but they found the thing they weren't expecting: living people. Only moments before spotting them, one of the looters used a tire iron to hit the girl on the back of the head. The impact rendered her unconscious and unresponsive, to which John reciprocated the looter's actions with his own pipe. John's attack, however, broke the man's head open, shattered his skull and killed him... As the other looters abandoned ship, John now had to come to terms with the fact that he'd killed someone.

 Unfortunately, to make matters worse, the girl proceeded to go comatose and later die of an aneurism. The things of this nature continued to go on. Others were slowly picked off by wounds, looters and, eventually, cancer from the radiation. One by one, the students fell as John could only watch the people he was supposed to protect and lead die off. It even came down to one of them dying slowly and John having to put them out more than once. It's very clear by the text that he sees every death as his fault, regardless of circumstances. This happened for months, and eventually, there were only 4 students left.

 Finally, it ended when Victor, toting along Aodhfin, broke the barricades down one day and alerted everyone that the singularity, the rogue military android invasion that had killed half of the earth's population at that point, was over. Unfortunately, amongst that half were 31 of 35 of the class John was leading and his old friend Killian. He comments that he still occasionally goes back to visit Killian's grave.

 Shortly after, Aodhfin made the declaration that he was going with Victor, and to do that he had become ageless, essentially. Victor had a method that had been tested on other materials, but not people. Aodhifn begged John to be the test subject. He agreed. His now-wife, Julie, demanded she be allowed to go with. Quickly, Aodhfin, John and Julie were all ageless in the same way Victor was; they were mortal, as they've always been, but completely unable to age biologically.

 Shortly after, John and Julie found a quiet timeline to settle down in and very rarely moved around. Aodhfin quickly became exponentially older than John and Julie became distant as the years started to wear on her mind. After trying effectively everything he could do, one night Julie seemed to be happy again. The next morning, he woke up to find her dangling from a rope in the ceiling, dead from hanging. The note she left him explained that she just wasn't meant to live that long and nothing could change the way she felt, in addition to endlessly worrying over his horrible traumas that he hid so phenomenally. She couldn't take it anymore.

 John quickly fell to alcoholism and sex addiction until he realized how empty the sex alone made him feel. He found himself in making people smile and it always made him feel like he was preventing someone from going through what he did. He also swore he'd never bring all these tragedies to his brothers' attention, as Aodhfin had always had enough emotional problems of his own to deal with.

 As the book nears its end, he mentions that the 4 surviving classmates all died. two couldn't live with what they'd seen and succumbed to their PTSD, one died of cancer in eight places and one of them woke up a vegetable after an enormous brain tumor caused them permanent damage and eventually died as well. He also mentions that he saw his brother less and less over time and eventually came to realize that Aodhfin would live on fine without him.

 The final moments of the book accentuate that he's never been okay, he doesn't expect to ever be okay and that waking up not only knowing that he failed at his job and has killed people but waking up and realizing he's alone because his wife died will ensure that he's never properly okay. As much as it hurts, he kinda went numb after a while and that's part of why he can act so well; normally, the travesties of his past don't bother him so it's very easy to paint on a smile and pretend to be the happiest person alive, all for the sake of others. He finally closes it out by mentioning he would gladly take his own life if the idea of an unknown afterlife didn't scare him so much. In the end, all he wanted to do was see his wife again, but if he couldn't be sure that'd be the way it worked out, he considered it not to be worth it, so he keeps going anyway, even though he really has nothing left to live for.