Lucy buys a suitcase for her trip to Texas, a reminder that she rarely travels and still associates leaving with the collapse of her marriage. When she gets home, Nathan immediately notices the luggage, and Lucy needles him with dark humor about dead bodies. The exchange quickly exposes the tension between them: Lucy can tell that Nathan has already decided she may have killed Savvy, even though he tries to act as if he wants to hear her side.

When Nathan asks for her version of events, Lucy gives the answer she has repeated for years: she still cannot remember what happened that night, but she would never have hurt Savvy. Nathan clearly expects something more, which only confirms Lucy's belief that he does not believe her. Before the conversation can go further, Lucy's mother calls and insists that Lucy stay at her parents' house instead of a hotel during the birthday trip, mainly because avoiding the family home would create more gossip in Plumpton.

On the phone, Lucy reluctantly agrees to stay with her parents, partly because money is now tight and partly because resistance feels pointless. Her mother also explains that she broke her leg falling off a stair machine at the gym, then starts to mention the podcast before Lucy cuts her off and says she already knows. That leads Lucy to think back to the first emails Ben Owens sent months earlier, asking to interview her for Listen for the Lie. Lucy ignored all of them, just as she ignores the many hateful messages she routinely receives about Savvy's murder.

Back in her room, Lucy rereads Ben's messages and reflects bitterly that nobody truly wants her side of the story, especially because her side is simply that she remembers nothing. She notices Nathan sitting outside, drinking and watching television, still uneasy around her. Curious despite herself, Lucy searches for the podcast online and sees that it has become a major national obsession, with widespread media coverage and social-media factions such as "Team Savvy."

The scale of the attention makes Lucy realize that everyone in Plumpton is almost certainly listening, which raises the stakes of her return. Even so, she knows she cannot refuse her grandmother, who rarely asks anything of her and has not seen Lucy in five years. Accepting that she is going back into a town newly consumed by her case, Lucy decides she may as well prepare herself and starts the first episode of Ben's podcast while packing.