Gideon returns to Old Town after leaving Wintersea House, carrying his father’s wine-soaked jacket and replaying the night with Rune Winters. He worries he moved too fast, suspects Rune may have deliberately spilled wine on him, and notes her odd reactions to the telegram invitation and her probing questions about his work while trying to seduce him.

As Gideon walks through the fog toward his tenement, he hears footsteps behind him and catches the sudden smell of roses, which unsettles him and makes him think of the body found beneath the bridge days earlier. Without his pistol, he slips onto a hidden footpath and waits in ambush, but the follower passes by and the scent disappears, leaving him unsure whether he imagined it.

Gideon enters the abandoned tailor shop beneath his building—his late parents’ former business—which he had used earlier to find supplies to stitch Rune’s flower. Remembering Rune’s complaint that she has no dress for the upcoming dinner and that her seamstress is unavailable, Gideon lights a lamp and approaches his parents’ old design notebooks.

Determined to maintain his courtship as an investigative cover, Gideon takes a blank notebook and begins sketching a dress as if his mother were designing it for Rune. He tells himself that getting closer will help him find evidence—casting scars or other proof—if Rune is the Crimson Moth, or else help him reach someone near her who is.

Gideon sketches through the night until dawn, filling and tearing out page after page until he finally lands on a design he can use. His last thought is whether Rune will like what he has made.