From Josh's POV, his roommate Tyler texts a girl named Aly to break things off, then complains she ghosted him for two months only to send him a strange screenshot. Tyler tosses Josh his phone, and Josh freezes: it's a screenshot from his own secret masked thirst-trap account, the.faceless.man. Playing it cool, Josh "accidentally" deletes the text. Tyler, uninterested in mask play and now seeing Sarah, dismisses it. Josh recognizes his own tattoos in the photo and realizes Aly has a mask kink.

Josh reflects on his life: he's the son of infamous serial killer George Marshall Secliff, looks identical to his father's mugshot, and a recent Netflix documentary has renewed public interest. He became a hacker as a teen to scrub his family from the internet, now works in cybersecurity from home, avoids dating women into true crime, and started his masked social media account to safely indulge his desire for admiration. Tyler is his only true friend, who stuck with him after his father's arrest.

Once Tyler leaves for the gym, Josh hunts through his account's comments, identifies Aly's username "aly.aly.oxen.free," hacks her private account to confirm it's her, and discovers she has commented lustfully on dozens of his videos, fantasizing about a masked man breaking into her home. He masturbates to the fantasy of breaking in and dominating her, noting with relief that violent urges don't arouse him, suggesting he isn't like his father.

Over the following week, Josh obsessively plans a real break-in: surveilling Aly's neighborhood, confirming she has no security system, practicing lockpicking, and preparing forensic countermeasures (balaclava, oversized boots with plastered soles, full skin coverage). He triggers a brief street-wide blackout to disable her floodlights, then picks her lock and defeats her deadbolt with magnets, mentally noting he'll anonymously buy her better security.

Inside, he's startled by Aly's cat, Fred, but instead of feeling predatory urges, he finds himself petting it, taking it as further evidence he may not be a psychopath. He refocuses on his mission: to film a video and plant a camera to test how serious Aly really is about her masked-intruder fantasy.