Harris senses something is wrong with the narrator and presses her during a TV show when she starts crying unexpectedly. She nearly confesses, and briefly hopes Harris might confess something himself, but he merely compares her post-trip adjustment to his own returns from recording studios in London. Cornered, the narrator blurts out that she's going through menopause, which immediately softens Harris and ends his interrogation. He offers sympathy, and she channels his comfort toward her real grief over Davey, grateful for the deflection.

After dinner, the family visits the dog park, where Sam fills water bowls for other people's dogs. The narrator snaps her rubber band each time she thinks of Davey, forcing herself to greet dogs instead. On the way home, Sam discovers the pink spray-painted "CALL ME" chair the narrator had placed near the park earlier. Harris decides it's cool and suggests bringing it home. The narrator, stunned by the irony that her family is unknowingly adopting the chair tied to her affair, agrees to place it under the linden tree.

The narrator's days settle into a compulsive cycle of cleaning and masturbating. She purges eleven garbage bags of old clothes, polishes wood, and scrubs doorknobs with boiled settler's dough. An oversized real estate mailer arrives featuring a photo of her own house—with the narrator visible in the window wearing her old pink robe. She realizes the photo was taken by the mysterious telephoto photographer from weeks earlier, solving that minor mystery. She pins the card above her desk in the garage next to her road-trip map and the neighbor's note.

Sam negotiates for a dog, and the family adopts a shaggy rescue mutt named Smokey the Bear from a shelter in Torrance. Smokey quickly breaks his leg and becomes an indoor mess with a cast and cone, but brings joy to Harris and Sam. When they leave the house, Smokey wails inconsolably, and the narrator—instructed by a trainer to model calm—instead screams on the phone with Jordi about whether Davey still thinks about her and masturbates to her. Jordi reassures her and suggests CBD for sleep, while the narrator snaps her rubber band manically. The narrator imagines a future where AI gives dogs speech and Smokey exposes her behavior. Eventually she abandons the trainer's advice, tries to comfort Smokey, and ends up wailing alongside him, singing a mournful sailor's-wife song about a lost "big dick," crying with her mouth hanging open before falling into silent grief while holding the crying dog.