- Their family is all over the newspapers now. Grandma Glad hires a local lawyer, who tells Bev that she needs to buy gray and navy outfits for the inquest.
- The lawyer, Markel, tells them that according to the coroner's report, Peter died by drowning. This goes in the good news column because it would've been harder to prove that they were innocent if he'd died from a blow to the head.
- Evie isn't allowed to go with her parents to the inquest, so she goes downtown and picks up a newspaper; in it, she reads that a surprise witness came forward at the inquest.
- A gift shop owner has testified that she saw Bev with Peter one day, and that they seemed like a couple in love. She also says that Bev bought a pineapple vase.
- Evie thinks about her first date with Peter, and how she was wrong all this time. Peter wasn't after her—he was trying to flirt with her mom, and she was just their cover. Ugh. She feels even stupider and sadder now.
- Other facts dawn on her, even as she tries to push them down. Her mom knew how to find her at the mansion that one night because she went there every day—that was her lipstick on the wine glass that the police found.
- Evie keeps reading the newspaper and sees that the policeman testified that her mom seemed nonchalant when she came back from the boating trip, and had said that she needed a bath.
- She knows her mother though, and she did care—she was frightened and dirty when she came back, and a bath was what she needed to calm herself down.
- The paper also mentions Bev holding hands with Grandma Glad in the courtroom, which makes her think that this whole thing is baloney, since she knows Bev would rather die than old hands with that old hag.
- She tries to figure out what this all means. She knows that Peter and her mom got together, but does that automatically mean that her parents killed Peter?
- Later that day, Joe drives her to the lawyer's office and tells her that he loves her and that he wanted to be her dad. He also says that she doesn't have to tell the lawyer everything, and that it's better if people don't know that he knew about Peter and her mother.
- He also tells Evie that he didn't kill Peter. He says that if they can just go home, they can be a family again, enveloped in love and normalcy once more.