The chapter opens with the narrator receiving a note from her next-door neighbor Brian, an FBI agent, informing her that a man with a telephoto lens was photographing through her large, curtainless front windows from a parked black Subaru. The narrator reads the note aloud to her husband Harris, who dismisses it as unremarkable and walks away. The narrator is left feeling a familiar sense of domestic abandonment, reflecting on the formal, cautious nature of her marriage—comparing herself and Harris to diplomats who never quite relax around each other, though she holds hope they'll eventually break through.

The narrator reflects on her friendships and her intense curiosity about other people's inner lives. She describes her best friend Jordi, a sculptor, and another friend Cassie, whose relationship habits she finds baffling. She collects personal ephemera from friends—sexts, emails—trying to understand what it feels like to be someone else, though she acknowledges these glimpses never add up to real understanding.

Two days later, she calls Brian. He describes the man and his car but suggests the photographer may have just been admiring the house. The narrator, a moderately well-known artist who works in multiple mediums, admits she hoped the surveillance was personal—connected to a deep longing to be watched over and cared about. Her phone conversation with Brian becomes unexpectedly intimate: they share a long silence that moves through awkwardness, connection, and inexplicable sadness. Brian offers to help her run the car's license plates through a retired cop named Tim Yoon.

That night in bed, the narrator reviews what she was doing at the time of the photographing: she had been alone, having sent her husband and son Sam to a playdate, and had taken and sent naked selfies to friends in New York. She is planning a solo trip to New York as a forty-fifth birthday gift to herself, funded by $20,000 from a whiskey company that licensed one of her sentences. Jordi encouraged her to spend the money lavishly and stay at the Carlyle hotel. Realizing the photographer may have captured her naked, the narrator is aroused rather than frightened, masturbating to fantasies about the man. She texts Tim Yoon about running the plates and falls asleep imagining him doing so, drifting into a surreal dream. The chapter ends with the narrator noting that by the time Yoon called back months later, she had already identified the photographer herself.