The narrator attends a potluck with Jordi at Nazanin and Kate's house, where she meets Tara, a blond woman with a baby who used to be Arkanda's personal assistant. Tara reveals that Arkanda's original reason for reaching out was not a creative collaboration but a personal connection: both Arkanda and the narrator experienced Fetal-maternal Hemorrhage (FMH) during childbirth. Arkanda learned about the narrator's experience through her nanny, Jess. This revelation reframes years of failed scheduling and cancellations—the narrator had been misled by her manager Liza, who had added the phrase "potential project" to the communications.

With this new understanding, Tara and Liza arrange a meeting between the narrator and Arkanda at the Excelsior motel. The narrator requests room 321—the room she had lovingly redecorated—but Skip has already given it to a couple from Portugal, placing Arkanda in the unrenovated room 322 instead. The narrator arrives to find Arkanda in a plain, crappy motel room. Despite the narrator's overdressed nervousness, Arkanda is casual and warm. Before discussing anything vulnerable, Arkanda performs a "pat-down" ritual—a non-sexual, full-body touch exercise she learned from the singer Chessi—to neutralize the celebrity-fan power dynamic and allow genuine connection.

Once equalized, the two women sit on the floor and share their FMH stories. Arkanda's son Smith was born with only three grams of blood; Sam had two. They discuss their children's neurological differences, their ongoing flashbacks, and the senselessness of a condition with no identifiable cause. Their conversation escalates into a raw, repetitive incantation—"I can't believe this happened"—which expands beyond the birth trauma to encompass all of life's inexplicable pain. They press their foreheads together, hands squeezed tight, and land in shared grief and love for each other's children. Afterward, they peel clementines and talk more casually; the narrator cries about Kris, and Arkanda advises her not to stay fixated on what's gone.

As Arkanda leaves for her studio, she offers a parting reinterpretation of the motel room's painting: perhaps the figure isn't mourning at the sealed cave but guarding it. This insight transforms the narrator's understanding of room 321—it is a womb she created, a sacred space for weekly renewal and oneness, something she doesn't own but can return to. The narrator sleeps in room 322 and wakes feeling transported back to her first morning at the Excelsior. She opens her laptop and begins to write the story from the beginning.