Phoebe Stone arrives alone at the Cornwall Inn in Newport wearing an emerald silk dress, her wedding shoes, and pearls. She has left St. Louis without luggage after years of depression that deepened after her divorce and the isolation of lockdown. The hotel matches the fantasy she once used as her "happy place," and Phoebe takes comfort in its formality because she has come there with a private purpose: to end her life.

In the lobby, Phoebe is confronted by a long check-in line full of guests for the wedding of Lila and Gary. She listens to two bridesmaids she mentally labels High Bun and Neck Pillow gossip about beauty, friendship, the pandemic, and the wedding while she feels increasingly alien among people who are loudly connected to one another. When Lila appears, radiant and socially effortless, she hugs the bridesmaids, hands out welcome bags, and then warmly includes Phoebe by mistake, giving Phoebe a brief, disorienting sense of being seen and welcomed.

At the front desk, Pauline assumes Phoebe is also there for the wedding, then checks her into the hotel's ocean-view penthouse suite, the "Roaring Twenties" room. Phoebe explains only that the Cornwall is her happy place, though she has never stayed there before; it is a place she imagined during therapy because she could no longer picture happiness in her real life. Pauline's routine hospitality briefly slows Phoebe down, but Phoebe remains determined and heads for the elevator with her room key.

Lila rushes into the elevator after Phoebe, catches her hand in the old doors, and starts bleeding. Alone together, Lila tries to place Phoebe among the wedding guests and becomes alarmed when Phoebe says she belongs to neither family and then calmly states that she came to the hotel to kill herself that night at sunset. Lila is horrified less by Phoebe's pain than by the threat Phoebe's death poses to her six-day wedding celebration, and the two women clash: Lila insists this is the most important week of her life, while Phoebe says the same of her planned death. Phoebe describes her intended quiet, orderly suicide in the room, revealing both how long she has carried this possibility and how deeply her loss has hollowed out her life.

When the elevator reaches the top floor, Lila discovers blood on her dress just as her bridesmaids approach, and she forces herself back into bridal performance. Phoebe walks away down the dark hallway, reflecting that there is no true happy place because sadness follows her everywhere. Inside her room, she locks the door, examines the wedding welcome gifts, and is unexpectedly caught by grief over ordinary pleasures she would never have again. She opens the bottle of German chocolate wine and drinks it, ending the chapter with her plan still intact but her attachment to life newly, painfully visible.