The narrator arrives at Davey and Dev's performance venue in New York, still cautious after her vertigo episode but finding it completely resolved. The crowd outside is massive—people who couldn't get tickets are still hoping to get in. She realizes that in the three and a half years since she stopped looking Davey up, he has become a major star. Standing in the will-call line, she feels self-conscious in her gray suit and anxious about possibly encountering people from Davey's life—Claire, his mother—but she only runs into a casual acquaintance. She picks up her ticket and enters the packed venue, which has bleacher-style seating around a central stage.

The performance begins with Dev dancing alone in a hypnotic, angular pattern across the stage's lit and dark zones. Davey then appears as Dev's shadow, and the audience's staggered recognition of him builds into exponential applause. The narrator watches the crowd fall completely in love with Davey—his bare-chested dancing, his erotic modern pas de deux with Dev—and she feels wretched, miserly jealousy. She had imagined him stuck at the Sacramento Hertz, living a small life with Claire, but instead he is blazing, adored, doing what he was born to do. She silently hopes for a creative misstep or plagiarism scandal to break his spell. The audience participates in a call-and-response chant—"All hands on the function!" and "The function grows!"—that builds into a syncopated frenzy, while the narrator refuses to sing along, feeling alienated and small.

Then a thunderclap of sound silences the room. The stage lights gradually dissolve into a warm orange-golden wash, and as Davey leaps off Dev and rises into the air, the narrator suddenly smells tonka bean and recognizes the light: it is the light of room 321, filtered through peonies and dahlias. The theater transforms in her perception into the motel room—safe, sacred, full of holy potential. Her jealousy and resistance dissolve. She realizes that the room is not a place but a state: the whole world is the room, every day is Wednesday, and she can always be how she was there—imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed, with a full soul. She understands that wanting to possess Davey would be like burning all the oil on the first night instead of letting it last eight miraculous nights, and she feels deep gratitude that dance itself created this transcendent experience.

Tears stream down the narrator's face, and she sees the person next to her is also crying. Looking around the circle of faces, she recognizes that every audience member is undergoing their own version of her revelation—a reckoning with who they have been. The miserly resistance was part of the ride: resistance, then giving in. Davey reaches his apex and falls. Afterward, the narrator walks outside into early evening, golden light everywhere, with plenty of time before her reading.