Mrs. Sigsby and Trevor Stackhouse discuss Maureen Alvorson’s role as an informant among the children, a position Alvorson accepted about sixteen months earlier and supported by a false narrative about surveillance dead zones. Stackhouse minimizes the value of Alvorson’s reports as mostly gossip, while acknowledging the snitching may have added to her guilt.

Mrs. Sigsby realizes how little she knows about Alvorson’s background beyond basics and reflects on her own recent carelessness, symbolized by leaving her walkie-talkie behind and tolerating deteriorating standards: dusty cameras, slow computers, food spoilage, mouse-chewed wires, weak night-shift reports, and lax coverage in the surveillance room.

She contrasts decades of secrecy—sustained in part by local rumors about the facility—with the present drift toward assumption and entropy. Although she frames Alvorson’s suicide as a manageable incident, she sees it as a warning sign of larger operational decay, some of it on her watch.

Issuing orders, Mrs. Sigsby demands a full background review of Alvorson and immediate staffing of the surveillance room. She learns the best tech, Jerry Symonds, is on furlough, Andy Fellowes is in the village, and only Zeke is potentially available—further proof of lax discipline.

Determined to institute sweeping changes before autumn, she decides to use the Zero Phone to report up the chain, despite her distaste for the man who answers it. She criticizes the Institute’s slide into shabbiness despite ample resources and insists on accountability.

Mrs. Sigsby orders Stackhouse to have Zeke run a locator check on all residents, with special attention to Luke Ellis and Avery Dixon, whom Alvorson had frequently engaged. Stackhouse counsels relaxation and dismisses Alvorson as a terminally ill woman who chose suicide, but Mrs. Sigsby refuses to relax until all children are confirmed present, concluding that there has already been too much relaxation.