Over a long summer, Frankie maintained a clandestine relationship with Joseph “Rye” Walsh while suspended from nursing. She hid her unemployment, lived off savings, and cycled between passion with Rye and crushing guilt afterward. Increasingly dependent on pills to sleep and wake, Frankie avoided calls from Barb and Ethel rather than confess the truth. Despite promising herself to stop, she continued the affair, pleading with Rye to stay nights; he refused, citing custody concerns for his daughter Joey, but spoke of a shared future and children with Frankie.

By August, the secrecy and self-loathing intensified. When Barb announced her wedding, Frankie felt immediate jealousy but traveled to Chicago for the ceremony. During the vows, she contrasted Barb and Jere’s open love with her own hidden affair and confided to Ethel that she still loved Rye. Ethel warned that Frankie, a fundamentally moral person, could not survive an affair with a married father. Holding Ethel’s daughter at the reception, Frankie decided: no more. She left early, flew home, and waited to end things with Rye.

When Rye arrived with flowers, Frankie told him she could not be the other woman. Instead of arguing, Rye painfully knelt and proposed. Overwhelmed, Frankie accepted, believing marriage would cleanse the shame. Over the next two months, they discussed rings, a beach ceremony, and a Kauai honeymoon. Frankie reduced her pills, hid the premarital affair from friends in her mind, and sought reinstatement at the hospital.

In late November, Frankie met with Director of Nursing Geneva Stone, acknowledged her prior impairment, and received an immediate shift. Feeling hopeful, she later visited a jeweler alone to look at rings, then returned to work. After her shift, she encountered reporters in the lobby asking for “Lieutenant Commander Walsh.” Learning the patient was Melissa Walsh on the fourth floor, Frankie went up and saw Melissa in a hospital room, surrounded by celebratory balloons and a newborn son.

Rye appeared in the hallway and began to speak, but Frankie fled, swallowed Valium in her car, and drove off as Rye apologized at her window. Realizing Melissa must have been pregnant throughout their affair—and that Rye had proposed when Melissa was near term—Frankie felt betrayed and blamed herself as well. She went to an anonymous bar in the Gaslamp Quarter, downed multiple gins, and left when a man hit on her.

Driving while crying and speeding to loud music, Frankie approached the bridge and briefly swerved toward danger before a bicyclist appeared. She slammed the brakes and yanked the wheel, but it was too late; the car spun out of control.