Back in the bedroom she emptied before leaving for Los Angeles, Lucy notices that her mother has fully remade the space with new furniture. The room no longer feels like her old one, which Lucy finds comforting. Sitting on the hard bed, Lucy checks her laptop and sees a mix of normal work messages, hateful abuse about Savvy's case, and a cheerful note from her agent, Aubrey Vargas, who assures Lucy that the podcast will not expose her real name.

Lucy then checks the social media accounts she keeps under her pen name, Eva Knightley. Lucy reflects that she shut down her personal accounts long ago to avoid attention, while Eva is safely known only as a friendly romance author. In her reader group, fans joke that a villain in Lucy's last book deserved to die, and one suggests that Eva should write serial-killer novels. Lucy jokingly replies that she is entering her "murder era," then immediately wonders whether her readers would still laugh if they knew who she really was.

When Lucy's mother calls her to dinner, Lucy again feels trapped in the role she had as a teenager. Grandma refuses to join them, claiming she is tired, and Lucy's mother bluntly interprets that as drunkenness. At the table, Lucy sits across from both parents and senses them as a united front against her, even in an ordinary family meal.

During dinner, Lucy observes that her father has cooked excellently despite his obvious resentment. Her mother asks about work, and Lucy lies instead of admitting that she has been fired, telling her parents she is still doing copyediting for an educational publisher. The conversation leads Lucy into memories of correcting grammar mistakes in church programs as a child, including the typo that turned "public" into "pubic" and got the receptionist, Jan, reassigned. Lucy reflects that those old acts of harsh correctness now seem minor compared with everything that happened afterward.