Paper lures Nate, Addie, Rusty, and Fatty to her kitchen with sweet potato pie, then gets Miggy to come from Pennhurst by bus. Miggy arrives in her white attendant uniform, freezes when she sees Nate, and makes it clear she will only talk about her own life and work, not any “plot” the others may be planning. As she eats, Miggy needles Fatty, exchanges guarded recognition with Nate about old Hemlock Row history, and lays down her view that truth and survival require caution around white authorities.

Miggy explains her background as a Lowgod from Hemlock Row and notes that only two families dominate the Row: Lowgods and Loves, with few Loves left—prompting Fatty to realize Nate is a Love. She then describes Pennhurst as a vast, self-contained “city” that appears clean outside but is brutal within. Miggy recounts neglect, restraints, sexual exploitation, and attendants’ unchecked power, emphasizing that patients remember what is done to them and that the institution’s routine cruelty is protected by indifference and bureaucracy.

Pressed to speak about a child, Miggy tells of a white “duck boy” who cannot speak and quacks, abandoned by his parents and eventually pushed down into the worst ward, C-1. Miggy becomes attached to him and notices he is terrified of an attendant. That attendant is a Lowgod man Miggy calls “Son of Man,” a smooth-talking, violent bully who runs C-1 like a gang, threatens Miggy with a knife, and abuses patients when supervisors are not watching.

Miggy says Son of Man sexually brutalized the duck boy so badly the child was hospitalized, then maneuvered him back onto C-1 to continue. Miggy prays, and soon the duck boy vanishes; she uses her pie plate to sketch Pennhurst’s buildings and the “straight line” escape a mouse would need to avoid danger. Miggy reveals that Pennhurst has miles of old supply tunnels and shares a rumor that a tunnel under C-1 may connect to the old furnace house and the railroad yard, offering a possible escape route—though walking those tunnels would require courage and luck.

Miggy ties the tunnels to “eggs”: Pennhurst cannot produce eggs on its farm, so an egg farm delivers thousands daily. A Black deliveryman—also a Lowgod—somehow gets hot eggs and coffee to fourteen distant lower-ward buildings by 6 a.m., a speed Miggy thinks is only possible via the tunnels. Miggy implies the group recently met this “Egg Man” and repeats a story that he helped the duck boy through a tunnel to the railroad yard, where Jewish railroad men supposedly sent the child to New York. Miggy then reports a new arrival in Son of Man’s ward: a deaf Black child recently injured and now out of casts, which alarms the room. Nate studies Miggy’s pie “map,” asks pointedly whether the Egg Man still brings Son of Man his eggs, and Miggy ends by warning that Son of Man already knows Nate.