Before dawn, Alice struggles to sleep and considers the meaning of “Nicollet” as the one you would give everything up for, wondering why Margaret abandoned her old life. She drives to the hotel, leaves her phone number on Hayden’s tea as an answer to his “Friends?” note, and spends time alone on the beach at sunrise, reflecting on why she writes and the urge to preserve people’s cores truthfully.

Alice then meets Margaret, who takes her out on an airboat behind her property. They pause the engine to talk despite the mosquitoes. Alice asks to back up to Margaret’s father, Frederick Ives, and his sister, Francine, and confirms the secret parentage timeline of Ruth Allen (daughter of Gerald and Nina, raised as Gerald’s niece).

Margaret describes Francine and Frederick’s idle, extravagant lives in San Francisco during the Depression: Francine indulged in showing dogs and horses, hiring and firing trainers whom she also treated as lovers; Frederick preferred gambling, placing humiliating terms rather than money, such as making a tycoon muck out Francine’s stables, and sometimes suffering similar losses himself.

Margaret contrasts “fast money” fame with old wealth, noting she was born into public scrutiny and became a split self, while her late husband, actor Cosmo Sinclair, came from nothing and struggled with fame that “was killing him long before the accident.” She frames this to explain how easily Frederick ensnared the ultra-wealthy in absurd bets.

When Gerald summoned Frederick and Francine to Los Angeles and threatened to cut them off, he pushed Francine to marry and Frederick to learn the business. In defiance, Francine chose work, taking over a failing ladies’ magazine as coeditor in chief and then editor in chief, ultimately turning it around despite Gerald’s likely intent to scare her into marriage. Frederick tried to coast at the film studio, seeking minimal work.

Margaret concludes that Francine succeeded because she had desperation, a drive her father lacked at that time, hinting that Frederick’s desperation would emerge later.