The narrator has been making significant progress at the gym under Brett and Scarlett's guidance—her free weights have increased from eight to twenty pounds, she dead-lifts an eighty-pound kettlebell, and she notices new strength in everyday tasks. One evening she strips down before the mirror with Sam, who observes she looks "taller." She calls Skip at the Excelsior and books room 321 for Wednesday.

She tells Harris she plans to spend regular Wednesday nights in Monrovia to work. He doesn't object, and she frames the arrangement as something that will ultimately benefit their marriage—a last hurrah with Davey that will let her libido settle. At the Excelsior, Skip reveals room 321 has become the motel's premium suite and offers her a permanent key at no charge, setting her up with a recurring Wednesday reservation. The room is immaculate, exactly as she left it. She changes into Davey's plaid shirt and the beige panties, reparks her car so the headlights illuminate her, and films an impassioned dance to the 1960s record, repeatedly rewinding it before "love" until she deliberately misses the cue and crawls toward the camera, disappearing into white light. She posts the video captioned "rn" and waits for Davey's response.

Over the next ninety minutes, no response comes. She leaves the room and walks through Monrovia, bargaining with herself—just a text, just a heart on the post. At a wine-and-cheese event outside the antique mall she encounters a woman named Audra, whom she realizes is the older woman who taught Davey about sex. Audra tells her that Davey and Claire moved to Sacramento two months ago and bought a house together. The narrator is devastated, understanding that her months of preparation—the training, the room, the video—were built on the assumption he was still nearby.

Audra invites her home for pear tea. In Audra's kitchen, the narrator learns the real story: Audra didn't "teach" Davey at his mother Irene's request—she had an affair with him when he was eighteen after he found a racy VHS tape of her. They were lovers for two years until he got serious with Claire. The narrator trades her own Davey story and shows Audra the redecorated motel room, which impresses Audra deeply. When the narrator begins to fall apart, Audra leaves and returns with the black leather belt from her story, a flask of tequila, and a proposition: rather than hoarding fantasies, the narrator should have a real experience.

What follows is an intimate, boundary-crossing encounter. Audra narrates her sexual history with Davey while the narrator masturbates, but the two women gradually come together physically. For the narrator, touching Audra's older body is revelatory—she discovers unexpected pleasure and new neural pathways, realizing this is her first new sexual partner since Harris. Afterward, Audra is matter-of-fact and unbothered, quickly dressing and heading home, upending the narrator's assumption that she was a pitiable figure. The narrator walks Audra home and then roams Monrovia for hours in a state of euphoria, reconceiving her life. She envisions a future of diverse, experimental relationships rather than one built on longing for Davey. She reinterprets the fork in the road not as "Davey vs. regret" but as "a life spent longing vs. a life that is continually surprising." Back in the room she finds Audra's belt by the sink, looks again at the old motel painting, and sees in it an old woman standing before a sealed cave—a cautionary image she pushes back under the bed.