After the room renovation is complete, the narrator spends two days in a depressive fugue, barely eating, watching TV, and subsisting on trail mix. She lies to Harris via text, claiming New York isn't great. On Memorial Day, a parade erupts outside the motel. Harris texts "Happy May 31"—Sam's due date—triggering an extended flashback to Sam's traumatic birth seven years earlier. Sam was born via emergency C-section after a rare fetal-maternal hemorrhage drained nearly all the baby's blood into the narrator. Sam spent seventeen days in the NICU with an uncertain prognosis. During that crisis, the narrator and Harris experienced an intense closeness—a "wartime romance"—that evaporated once Sam reached a reassuring milestone around the due date, after which they returned to emotional distance.

After the parade ends, the narrator recovers her appetite, bathes, dresses, and walks to the Hertz lot to find Davey. He gets permission to leave work and takes her on a walking tour of Monrovia. He mentions a mysterious "calling" he's ten years behind on, and the narrator offers earnest advice about committing one's life to a craft. Over the next several days, their afternoon walks become a ritual—she arrives at four o'clock each day, shaking with nervous energy. During one walk, Davey removes his sweater and his shirt lifts, briefly exposing his chest. The narrator is struck by an overwhelming physical desire she has never felt before.

That night alone in Room 321, she masturbates to fantasies of Davey and is hit by a devastating realization: she is too old for him. This triggers a profound existential crisis about aging, desire, and missed chances. She connects it to her family's matrilineal history of suicide—her grandmother Esther and aunt Ruthie both jumped from the same Park Avenue window. She reflects that she had never before desired a specific male body the way she desires Davey's, and mourns having discovered physical longing only after she believes her window for being desired in return has closed.

She texts Harris, maintaining the New York fiction. On subsequent walks, the narrator and Davey share quiet, charged moments—searching for the invisible border between Monrovia and Arcadia, sniffing a sweet-smelling wooden fence. She confides in Jordi about the sexual turn her feelings have taken; Jordi urges her to mention Claire's renovation work to Davey, but the narrator resists. Jordi also reveals she ran into Harris but didn't have to lie because the narrator didn't come up. The narrator then resolves to go home, reframing the whole episode as an amusing failure story. She calls the front desk and begins checking out, striking a deal with Skip to leave the renovated room as-is. But at the sound of the four o'clock gong, she panics, cancels her checkout, and rushes to Hertz—only to find Davey has just left. She spots him by his car; he can't walk today because Claire needs him, but he invites her to meet at the Buccaneer bar at eight o'clock that evening. She agrees, electrified, and begins planning what to wear.