While on the phone, Machado’s partner says that because she is in love with Machado, she must tell her long-distance girlfriend, Val, who lives in New York. Machado struggles to control her emotions; her competing love, fear, desire, and sorrow feel like an ungovernable menagerie of wild animals.

Iowa’s MFA program rejects Machado’s partner’s application, but Indiana’s graduate program accepts her. Their plans of living together in Iowa City give way to her partner moving to Indiana with Val, who promises to move from New York. Machado’s partner proposes a polyamorous relationship, to which Machado agrees despite feeling hurt that her partner doesn’t want to be monogamous.

Machado accompanies her partner and Val to Bloomington, Indiana to look at houses to rent. During their search, Machado fantasizes about the future and being in a polyamorous relationship. She begins to consider it a possibility for happiness, and “the perfection and lushness of this arrangement” (40) replaces her reservations of having to share her partner. The houses inspire Machado to muse on representing architecture in writing, as indoor windows seem to signify that “the house had swallowed a second, tiny house” (40). Val returns to New York to finish packing for the move, and Machado drives herself and her partner back to Iowa.