Reeling from recent turmoil, June impulsively travels to her mother’s suburban Philadelphia home seeking comfort. She arrives to find the house half-packed; her mother is preparing to sell and move to Melbourne to be closer to family. The news unsettles June, who is more attached to the house than her sister, Rory. Sent upstairs, June finds her old composition notebooks and lingers in the past.

June spends hours paging through sketches and fragments from her adolescence—phases influenced by Twilight, emo music, and Ayn Rand—remembering when writing felt playful and private. She boxes the notebooks to bring back, recognizing they won’t solve her current block but will remind her that writing once brought joy. Her reflections sour as she contrasts that freedom with professional publishing’s pressures, market demands, and expectations of persona, which make her feel unwanted as a “plain, straight white girl from Philly.”

At dinner over Chinese takeout, their familiar quiet gives way to tension. When asked, June admits she’s creatively stuck. Her mother suggests moving on—again recommending an accounting master’s—triggering an argument over stability versus art. June confesses a terror of being forgotten and a need to be read, even as she fears her success depends on channeling Athena rather than her own voice.

Her mother proposes work with Aunt Cheryl and relocating to Melbourne, then reveals that she and Rory reviewed June’s tax returns to plan investments. June bristles at the intrusion and accuses her mother of never supporting her writing. Her mother insists she only hoped to protect June from heartbreak. The visit ends in unresolved strain between June’s ambition and her mother’s pragmatism.