Cherry reflects on her first job as a junior biometrician for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, where she applied statistical analysis to study Australia's western grey kangaroo population. Though people imagine her doing glamorous fieldwork in the outback, she mostly spent her time at a desk analyzing data—work she found deeply satisfying because it echoed the problem-solving she had done with her father at the kitchen table as a child. She used a slide rule before transitioning to scientific calculators and eventually computers.

During occasional fieldwork at remote sheep and cattle stations, Cherry met Suzanne, a thin, red-haired woman unhappily married to a man who shouted. On impulse, Cherry offered to read Suzanne's palm—something she had never done before despite her mother and grandmother being well-known palm readers. Cherry discovered the skill came to her easily, having unconsciously absorbed her mother's techniques by eavesdropping through a purple curtain as a child. She told Suzanne, "I see you leaving," the same phrase her mother Madame Mae used with unhappy women to help them envision a different future. Cherry recalls how her mother would give specific, practical escape instructions to women with violent husbands, directing them to her friend Dulcie's unofficial women's refuge on the Central Coast.

After returning to the office, Cherry felt deep shame about the reading, worrying she had recklessly meddled in Suzanne's life. She never learned the outcome and didn't read another palm for many years. Cherry also introduces her boss Baashir, a Scottish man of Pakistani descent who was the first openly gay person she'd met. Baashir was a passionate traveler who had hitchhiked from Scotland to Australia over two years and inspired Cherry's interest in travel, red wine, and eventually invited her to a Swiss fondue party that supposedly "changed her destiny"—a phrase Cherry dismisses as a logical fallacy.