After Caroline comes home from work, Mallory avoids confronting her immediately about Teddy’s disturbing drawings. Mallory tries to distract herself with a short run, dinner, and television, but she cannot stop thinking about Teddy’s latest image of hands around Anya’s throat. Once Teddy is likely asleep, Mallory takes the three newest drawings outside so she can finally show them to his parents.

On the lawn by the pool, Mallory interrupts Ted and Caroline and accidentally injures herself when she trips over a sprinkler head. While Ted and Caroline help her, Caroline notices the drawings in Mallory’s hand. When Caroline and Ted examine them, Caroline is alarmed, but Ted quickly dismisses the images as a result of the violent original Brothers Grimm stories he reads to Teddy at night. Caroline agrees the stories are inappropriate and orders Ted to stop reading them, and both parents initially treat the problem as a manageable parenting issue rather than a deeper threat.

Mallory pushes back and says Teddy claims Anya is telling him what to draw. She suggests that Anya may be Annie Barrett, the woman who disappeared from the guest cottage in the 1940s, and argues that Teddy only began drawing obsessively after moving onto this property. Caroline rejects the idea completely, insisting Teddy is simply imaginative and intellectually advanced. When Mallory adds Teddy’s bedwetting, rigid habits, isolation, and violent drawings as reasons for concern, Caroline becomes offended and reminds Mallory that she is a doctor and capable of assessing her own son.

The argument escalates further when Mallory admits she discussed the drawings with Mitzi before bringing them to Teddy’s parents. Caroline angrily attacks Mitzi’s credibility and refuses to connect Teddy’s behavior to ghosts or the renovated cottage. The conflict makes clear that Caroline experiences Mallory’s concern not as help, but as a challenge to her authority and competence as both Teddy’s mother and a psychiatrist.

The confrontation worsens when Teddy appears by the pool, unable to sleep. Ted tells Teddy to stop drawing Anya because the pictures are too scary, which makes Teddy look betrayed and run away. Caroline leaves in anger, effectively ending the conversation, and Mallory is left crying and ashamed. Ted comforts Mallory, explains that Caroline is highly protective and guilt-ridden after a difficult road to parenthood and her return to work, then takes the drawings from Mallory and tears them up, removing the evidence but not Mallory’s unease.