In New York on March 12, 2014, Addie walks uptown reading The Odyssey, expecting a quiet night at the Baxter with wine and a bath. Her plans collapse when she sees James St. Clair returning in a black sedan, and she stops short, unwilling to risk being trapped again in his life and his apartment.

Choosing flight over comfort, Addie heads downtown toward the East Village. Hungry, she steals a delivered carton of Chinese food from a cyclist’s delivery case, eating as she walks; the pain of hunger persists even if it cannot kill her, and long practice has worn away her guilt.

Addie reaches a brick building with a green door and slips inside behind a smiling stranger. She climbs to the roof using a hidden spare key she found months earlier while tangled on the stairs with Sam, a painter she has been having a fast-burning affair with—because slow intimacy is a luxury Addie cannot keep when no one can truly know her.

On the roof, Addie leans against the low wall and looks out at Manhattan, missing the stars and remembering a boy in 1965 who drove her outside L.A. to see them. The nostalgia turns uneasy as Addie wonders whether the darkness that cursed her is still watching, despite his insistence that he doesn’t track every life.

The rooftop door bursts open and Sam arrives with four friends. Sam recognizes Addie, repeats her familiar admiration for someone “looking up,” and then steps close to shield Addie’s cigarette from the wind, their closeness charged by shared history. Sam touches Addie’s cheek and tells her, intimately, that Addie has “stars,” before being called back to the group; Sam leaves with a final smile, and Addie chooses not to chase her.

Left alone, Addie reflects on how being forgotten erodes reality and sanity—if no one remembers a thing, can it be said to exist? She takes a lone beer from the cooler, settles into a broken lawn chair under fairy lights, and reads The Odyssey—a story of monsters and men who cannot go home—until the cold finally lulls her to sleep on the roof.