Samantha, exhausted and emotionally depleted, processed the crossed-wires revelation that Xavier was in California while she was in Minnesota. Xavier proposed finding flights to reunite as quickly as possible, calculating that he could return to Minnesota by evening while Samantha could not reach California until the next day.

Despite Samantha urging him to stay put because he was too sick to travel, Xavier insisted on not losing time together and revealed he was already in an Uber back to the airport. The situation, after months of compounding hardships, broke Samantha down.

At Xavier’s Minnesota apartment, Samantha cried harder upon seeing evidence of how ill and alone Xavier had been: overflowing trash with empty medicine boxes, an unmade bed, and piled laundry—conditions unlike his usual neat habits. She felt she had failed him and believed there was no solution that would allow her to be both with him and caring for Lisa.

Samantha briefly considered ending the relationship to free Xavier to find someone local who could care for him but realized she could not leave him, just as she could not leave her mother. She recognized the asymmetry: Xavier was effectively in love with someone who felt “invisible” due to her absence.

She rallied and poured her energy into preparing for his return: stripping the bed, bleaching the shower, disinfecting, washing dishes, vacuuming, opening blinds, doing laundry, and ordering groceries to cook for him. She worked with manic urgency, hoping a clean, welcoming home would at least ease his return after a four-thousand-mile round trip while sick.

Even as she worked, Samantha acknowledged that no amount of cleaning could solve the fundamental problem of their distance and the isolation Xavier had endured because of their circumstances. She wished she could forget this painful realization.