After a sleepless night, Mallory goes to the main house prepared to apologize to Caroline for the previous evening. Instead, Caroline apologizes first for her outburst, the two reconcile, and Caroline again offers to move Mallory from the cottage into the house. Mallory declines, wanting to avoid further disruption, and stays behind with Teddy after Caroline leaves for work.

While playing with Teddy under the kitchen table, Mallory tries to reassure him that she still wants to see his drawings. Teddy reveals that Caroline told him scary pictures could make Mallory "sick again," which shocks and hurts Mallory because it connects her recovery to his art. Later, during Quiet Time, Mallory overhears Teddy seemingly talking to someone in his room, then hears what sounds like a pencil moving on paper. When Teddy comes downstairs, his hands are smudged with dark marks, strengthening Mallory's suspicion that he is still drawing in secret.

Over the next several days, life appears mostly normal. Mallory and Teddy play, shop, swim, and talk, and Mallory briefly wonders whether Teddy's vivid imagination might explain everything. But when Teddy asks innocent questions about bodies and sex, Caroline reacts by taking over that subject completely, bringing home explicit educational books and telling Mallory to send all future questions to her. The exchange leaves Caroline cooler and more distant, increasing Mallory's sense of exclusion.

As Teddy's Quiet Times grow longer, Mallory becomes convinced he is hiding new drawings. She begins listening outside his door, hearing scraps of strange one-sided conversations, pencil sharpening, and pages tearing from a sketchpad. On Friday, while Teddy is in the bathroom, Mallory secretly searches his bedroom from top to bottom, using the same instincts she once used to hide drugs from her mother. She finds nothing before Teddy calls for toilet paper, forcing her to stop.

By the weekend, Mallory worries she is becoming paranoid, but on Monday morning she suddenly realizes she overlooked one possible hiding place: the wastebasket in Ted's second-floor office, which Teddy passes on his way downstairs. She races to the curb before the recycling is collected and pulls a crumpled ball of paper from the bin. Back in the cottage, Mallory unfolds nine pages and sees that they are not random scraps but a sequence of increasingly controlled and detailed sketches, like a hidden sketchbook for some larger work, confirming that Teddy has continued drawing and concealing it.