Rocky and Nick attempt make-up sex in the outdoor shower but it fails comically due to splinters, cramps, laughter, and Rocky's body no longer cooperating. They abandon the effort affectionately, though Rocky reflects on how sex has become fraught for her—a body marked by reproductive complications, allergies, infections, and emotional grief—while remaining straightforwardly pleasurable for Nick. She recalls Willa recently asking whether she still identifies as queer.

At the bay beach, Willa wades in to gather hermit crabs, and Rocky watches with overwhelming maternal love. She remembers her younger, more anxious and exasperated self at this same beach, and recalls a moment when eight-year-old Jamie watched hermit crabs swap shells in a sand pool—a memory she fears her children associate with her vigilance rather than wonder.

Willa joins Rocky at the water's edge and teases her about the time she told Willa not to worry about her flip-flops being stolen—and they were. Nick joins them, and the family wades out into the shallow tide, encountering sea creatures and an anxious older couple worrying about a baby's cold-purple face. They return to their spot after briefly mistaking another family's belongings for their own.

Rocky chooses wine from the cooler, then drifts into a painful memory: swimming alone at the beach after a miscarriage when Jamie was five and Willa not yet two, peeling off her swimsuit underwater and crying. Willa pulls her back to the present, anxious about her mother's mood. Rocky reassures her with a partial truth, reflecting that love means honesty, small lies, and silences. The ice cream truck arrives, breaking the moment, and Rocky and Nick share a tender exchange about their daughter.