In January, two years earlier, Phoebe and her husband, Matt, try to plan an extravagant spring-break vacation after their final fertility-clinic visit ends in failure. The doctor advises against a sixth IVF cycle, and Phoebe is left bleeding from a miscarriage the clinic calls a "nonviable pregnancy." Because research and planning are how Phoebe manages pain, she becomes absorbed by the Cornwall Inn and builds a detailed spreadsheet of excursions, hoping a lavish trip will restore some joy. Matt initially joins the fantasy, but his cool reaction to her "spreadsheet of fun" and their increasingly scheduled, joyless sex show that grief is already warping their intimacy.

At their university, Phoebe feels diminished beside Matt's admired, tenured career and her own insecure adjunct status. She notices Matt gently reassuring a female student, endures a patronizing committee meeting, and later learns that Matt has won the Arts and Letters Scholar of the Year award. His success sharpens Phoebe's sense that they no longer share the same future. She tries to reconnect by texting him an explicit invitation for later and pushes to book the expensive Cornwall, but Matt rejects the idea and suggests their usual Ozarks trip instead. Phoebe, desperate for something larger and less ordinary than their life has become, jokes that another stay in their miserable motel will make her kill herself.

In the weeks before Matt's awards dinner, Phoebe grows more emotionally unstable and intellectually fixated on broken narratives. Teaching fairy tales makes her think about dead mothers, infertile women, and the way she believed her own disciplined life would earn a happy ending. Instead, after five IVF cycles and one brief pregnancy, she feels her story has collapsed into meaningless tragedy. She struggles to write, drinks more, confides in Harry the cat, visits Joe's wine shop, and buys a costly emerald silk dress in a burst of wanting to be seen. But when it is time to leave for the ceremony, shame makes her change back into her safe black dress.

At the university awards dinner, Matt's admiration for Phoebe briefly makes them feel like a united couple again. Once inside, however, the evening intensifies Phoebe's humiliation: colleagues treat her mainly as Matt's wife, ask vague questions about her work, and Matt reflexively describes her as someone still finishing a Jane Eyre book that has stalled for years. When Matt receives his award, Phoebe is proud of him, but the pride curdles when she sees him laughing freely with Mia in a way Phoebe has not seen in months. In that moment, Mia stops being an abstractly beautiful colleague and becomes a personal threat.

Back home, Phoebe tests Matt by remarking on Mia's beauty, then has sex with him only by imagining him as a stranger desired by younger women. The act does not restore them. Soon afterward, the pandemic cancels their Ozarks trip and traps them in a stagnant marriage in which Phoebe cries, Matt drinks, and both retreat from each other. By August, on the eve of the fall semester, their conversations have become empty and dishonest; Phoebe tries and fails to write, hides a cigarette, and senses how little remains between them. That night, Matt packs a bag, tells Phoebe that he is in love with Mia, and leaves, revealing the collapse that turned the Cornwall from a fantasy escape into the place Phoebe now intends to die.