After showering at the Hutch with verbena soap and incense to counter the Veil’s stink, Alex dresses in Lethe sweats, notes Darlington’s untouched clothes, and leaves a lamp burning before heading back to Vanderbilt. A text from Dean Sandow—“Have confabbed w Centurion. Rest easy.”—signals he will manage the murder fallout and wants Alex to stay out of sight until the new-moon rite to retrieve Darlington, now less than a week away.

In the dorm common room, Alex trades small talk with Mercy, deflecting questions about her night and accepting edited pages of her struggling Milton essay. She reflects on Mercy’s curated life, her own frayed past, and the scant belongings she has brought to Yale. Before breakfast, Alex doses herself with basso belladonna eye drops—a potent Lethe stimulant—to power through the morning.

At the Jonathan Edwards dining hall, while Mercy plots social outings, Professor Marguerite Belbalm summons Alex to her office. Alex is awed by Belbalm’s poise and precisely curated space. Over tea, Belbalm probes Alex’s aims at Yale—pressing on stability, ambition, and purpose—and cautions that Alex’s course choices look like attempts at ease rather than a path. Belbalm offers concrete help: attend her salon, finish the year strong, consider a summer job as her assistant, and enroll in a composition program to get Alex on track. Alex, exhausted from treading water without Darlington, sees the offer as a bridge to a viable future and agrees to try.

Leaving the office buoyed, Alex goes to Spanish class amid campus chatter about the “townie” murder near Payne Whitney. She notes the lack of real fear among students because the victim was not one of them. With two free hours, instead of resting, she returns to the crime scene. The police tape remains, and a news van lingers. The arrangement of streets and stakes looks familiar to her from another angle, stirring unsettling echoes of Hellie’s death and the night she and friends moved Hellie’s body.

Alex spots the Bridegroom, a haunter Gray with a visible gunshot wound, among the fewer ghosts now clustered by the gym. When he drifts toward her, she withdraws, avoiding entanglement with a spirit who can make himself felt across the Veil. The stimulant crash hits as she returns to Vanderbilt; she plans to sleep and write her report to Sandow later.

In the darkened room, thoughts of Hellie spiral into a waking vision that links Hellie to Tara—“She’s you without a second chance.” Wrestling with the urge to defer to Detective Turner and Sandow’s directive to stand down, Alex decides she cannot yet let Tara’s murder go. She reaches for the basso belladonna again, committing to spend one more afternoon pursuing Tara’s case before attempting to bury it and focus on the future Belbalm outlined.