Allegra Patel, a twenty-eight-year-old flight attendant, takes a phone call from her mother while lying in the North Sydney apartment of First Officer Jonathan Summers, a pilot she has been secretly hooking up with for six months. Her mother inquires about Allegra's back injury and painkillers, and Allegra struggles to maintain her adult composure during the conversation. Allegra's back had seized up the morning after her twenty-eighth birthday—the same day as the fateful Hobart-to-Sydney flight—and while recovering on painkillers, she told her mother and an orthopedic surgeon cousin about the passenger who predicted she would die by "self-harm" at age twenty-eight.

Since then, Allegra's mother has been anxiously monitoring Allegra's mental state, a concern rooted in the family's history of depression. Both of Allegra's parents have dealt with depression, and her paternal grandmother ended her own life at fifty-six by overdosing on headache tablets. An aunt told young Allegra and her brother Taj that their grandmother's spirit was trapped in an "in-between place" because she died before her ordained time. This gave Allegra years of claustrophobic nightmares about mustard-yellow walls closing in. Taj, by contrast, used logic to reject the aunt's claims entirely and became secular. Allegra reassures her mother she is fine and promises to attend Diwali.

After the call, Allegra reflects on her relationship with Jonny. They met outside of work six months ago at a concert and began a pattern of secret hookups at his apartment—great sex, takeout, wine, no emotional attachment. But tonight Jonny is acting differently: he has baked her a chicken pie with a lattice crust for her belated birthday, he shares that his brother suffered depression in high school, and he asks about the prediction she received on the flight. Allegra tells him the passenger predicted she would die by self-harm at twenty-eight.

Jonny is sympathetic and asks whether she filed an incident report; she didn't, having only reported her back injury and the vomiting child. He reassures her it's probably fine since no passenger complaints or viral videos have surfaced in six weeks. As the pie bakes and fills the apartment with warmth, Allegra notices Jonny's unusual vulnerability and openness. She feels an unexpected emotional pull toward him—wondering whether a relationship that started with sex could loop back to friendship and love. The chapter ends with Jonny asking her to tell him her life story, and Allegra sensing he genuinely wants to know.