The chapter opens with Alice on set photographing five non-model women ranging in age from their twenties to seventies for Swish, a weekly style magazine. The session is lively: music pumps, a fan blows, and the women relax into joyful, unselfconscious poses. Alice feels fully in control behind the camera and is proud as images load to her laptop, drawing admiration from Willa, the magazine’s photo editor.

Alice and Willa review the images shoulder to shoulder. They pause on a radiant shot of Monica, a new mother who had been the most nervous, now captured in a moment of pure joy. Willa praises the abundance of strong options and sets a two-week deadline for filing the selects, while Alice anticipates only minimal retouching because the brief emphasized authenticity and “regular people.”

Willa then quietly requests more extensive editing: keep it “authentic,” but reduce visible “lumps and bumps” to a mere suggestion. Alice’s smile fades as she recognizes yet another euphemistic demand to make women’s bodies conform to conventional standards. Though frustrated and internally crumbling, Alice maintains professional composure and tells Willa it is the magazine’s call.

After Willa leaves, the day’s exertion and months of overwork catch up to Alice. She reflects on how freelancing has increasingly required compromises she dislikes. She also recalls a recent coffee with Elyse, her former instructor and mentor, who said Alice looked like a ghost and urged her to reclaim her inner light by slowing down—advice Alice has ignored while burying herself in assignments and wrestling with a recurring chase dream.

Determined to take a break for one night—avoid deadlines, forget the looming August group show, quiet worries about Elyse’s concern, and not think about Trevor—Alice decides to go out with her older sister, Heather. As Alice locks up the studio, Heather floods her phone with excited texts about scoring a table at Jaybird and offers to buy Alice “party shoes.”

Just as Alice starts to reply to Heather, another message arrives from an unspecified sender, signaling an unexpected contact that interrupts her tentative plans for a restorative evening.