By the morning after Alison Danzinger’s body is found, the news is saturated with coverage of the river recovery. Tom stays home because school is canceled, and he spends the day alone, compulsively rewatching the footage. He wants to contact Slug but avoids it because he fears their communications could be monitored, and the person he most wants to talk to is Daisy.

Tom’s mother returns home in the afternoon carrying a duffel bag. She embraces Tom and immediately brings up the news that Alison has been found dead. Tom confirms it, while internally registering that Alison is now definitively part of the past.

Tom takes his mother’s bag upstairs and notices that his parents’ bed still looks disturbed from two days earlier. Because Tom’s father has not been sleeping there, the unmade bed reassures Tom that no one can easily prove otherwise. This small detail reinforces Tom’s continuing effort to preserve the appearance that nothing is wrong.

Back downstairs, Tom’s mother asks where his father is. Tom tells her he is at work, but she says she already called the store and learned he was not there. She also points out that Tom’s father’s car is still in the garage. Tom keeps improvising lies, claiming he saw his father that morning and suggesting he must have walked somewhere, even though Tom knows that is implausible.

The conversation grows more dangerous when Tom’s mother notices the rug is missing. Tom says he spilled cranberry juice on it and threw it away after it stained. His mother is upset because she loved the old rug and would have tried to save it, but Tom insists it is already gone with the garbage. As Tom listens to her mourn the rug, he imagines how similar the conversation might sound if he told her what really happened to his father.

Tom’s mother eventually gives up questioning him and goes upstairs to rest before making dinner, accepting that Tom’s father probably will not join them. Once she is gone, Tom returns to the television and keeps watching the news, still trapped in anxiety over Alison, Slug, and the lies he is maintaining at home.