Kit hides Lenora’s typed pages in a lockbox because the pages now read like a partial confession, and Kit fears being implicated by possessing them. Soon after, she hears noises outside, goes onto the terrace, and finds freshly fallen slate shingles plus a bent metal hook-like piece. While looking up, Kit notices Mrs. Baker’s lit window and then sees a gray blur moving inside Lenora’s otherwise dark bedroom. Distracted, Kit trips on the broken shingles and nearly falls over the terrace railing before catching herself.

Carter comes across the lawn, initially calling out for Mary because he mistakes Kit for the missing caregiver in the dark. Seeing Kit shaken, he brings her to the groundskeeper’s cottage instead of back into the mansion. There he gives her whiskey, explains that he lives separately because the cottage comes with the job, and admits he was a bartender before becoming Hope’s End’s groundskeeper. He also says Mrs. Baker drinks heavily, complicating Kit’s stern impression of her.

The conversation turns to the household and Mary’s disappearance. Carter says Mary left abruptly without warning, even though he believed she was content, and that he mostly spoke with her during evening chats on the terrace. When Kit wonders whether Lenora frightened Mary away, Carter pushes back against the assumption that Lenora is guilty. He says that if Lenora did not kill her family, the likeliest suspect is Ricardo Mayhew, the groundskeeper in 1929, who remained on the property the night of the murders and then vanished forever afterward. Carter adds that Ricardo’s wife, Berniece, had been away in town and still lives locally.

Kit measures Carter’s theory against what Lenora has already typed about the bloody nightgown, the hidden knife, and her actions after the murders. Because those details still seem damning, Kit does not tell Carter what Lenora has revealed. Even so, the idea that Ricardo matters gives Kit a new line of thought. She returns to the mansion, fights the dizzying tilt of the house and the whiskey, barges into Lenora’s room, and directly demands that Lenora tell her about Ricardo Mayhew.

Lenora’s typed narrative then shifts back to 1929. After spending ten minutes crying in the ballroom on her birthday, Lenora searches for Archie because he usually comforts her, but she cannot find him. She goes onto the terrace, climbs onto the railing, and briefly considers throwing herself into the ocean because she feels trapped in a corrupt, loveless household. Before she can act, a handsome servant steps from the shadows and warns her to be careful. The man is Ricardo, who introduces himself as Ricky after Lenora confesses that she would kill to leave Hope’s End.