The narrator hatches a plan to lure Davey by driving back to the Excelsior, setting up headlights, and filming herself dancing provocatively between the columns. She intends to post the video rather than text it directly, knowing Davey checks his feed every fifteen minutes. She frames her desire urgently: she wants to have sex with him before menopause effectively ends her sexual vitality, leaving her to live another forty-five years in a diminished state.

However, when the narrator films herself nude from behind, she is shocked to discover her body has changed significantly without her noticing. Her butt has lost its roundness, and her midsection has shifted. Consulting the internet, she determines it will take three to six months of training to reshape her abs and glutes. Cross-referencing her hormone graph, she estimates she has about four months before a dramatic hormonal decline. She commits to a three-month training regimen, framing the choice starkly as sex with Davey versus a life of bitterness and regret.

The narrator joins a small neighborhood basement gym run by a couple named Scarlett and Brett. She begins an intense weightlifting program, enduring painful sessions fueled entirely by thoughts of Davey—imagining presenting her transformed body to him, fantasizing about saving him from danger, and channeling rage at what he has done to her life. In the final exhausting minutes of each session, her mind empties and she floats home on endorphins.

Over ice cream with sprinkles, Jordi challenges the narrator's fixation, asking what happens after she has sex with Davey. Jordi suggests Davey might be a chimera—an impossibility meant to remain uncatchable, like the Road Runner. The narrator deflects with a joke but privately recognizes she sounds like someone deluding herself that sex can save her, when she knows only her work can. She has no creative project; her calendar holds only gym days. When Jordi asks about the long-delayed collaboration with the famous artist Arkanda, the narrator is startled that even Jordi—previously dismissive of Arkanda—thinks she needs creative redirection.

Driving home, the narrator calls her manager Liza to check on the Arkanda collaboration. Liza reveals the timeline has stretched far longer than the narrator realized: Arkanda's original assistant Zoe first reached out around the time the narrator won the Blinken Prize—a debut award from many years ago. Multiple assistants have come and gone since. The narrator, stung by the realization of how much time has passed and how her professional relevance may have faded, tells Liza to let it go. Liza gently suggests the narrator might receive recognition again much later in life, in her eighties or nineties—a small flurry of attention that sometimes comes to women artists right before death. Until then, the narrator faces what Liza implies is a long creative wilderness.