While waiting for a flight at an airport, the protagonist notices the way the sun lights up a couple with identical mullets. “She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying” (117). When she later talks with another influencer about their lives lived in the portal, the protagonist is elated to find someone who is as dependent on the portal as she is. She attempts to present her theory on modern womanhood during a speech but cuts herself short after she hears a groan from the crowd.

The protagonist receives a text from her mother asking how soon the protagonist can fly home as something is wrong with her sister’s unborn child. The shock of the text makes the protagonist realize how absorbed in the portal she has been: “She fell heavily out of the broad warm of us, out of the story that has seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing” (120).

The protagonist flies to meet her family, moves in with them, and accompanies her sister to an ultrasound. The technician shows them the asymmetrical development of the baby’s body.