A man and a woman sit in a field in the Catskills in New York. The man paints while the woman bird watches, attempting to identify each one she sees. When the man finishes painting, the two begin walking through nature. The woman, whom the man calls Twig, begins to interrogate the man on his life: what he has been doing in the morning and the afternoon and on weekends, who he eats lunch with, what friends he hangs out with. The man gives mostly curt answers. The two are exes, having broken up in the recent months. They have not been in the valley, in _their _place, for six months. They lament the fact that the valley seems to have become known to other people, people who do not care about nature and leave their trash wherever they please.

The man does not ask about the woman much or seem to want to know what she has been up to. The man is out of a job and spends all day painting, with painting as his only source of income. A month before, when the man had lost his job, he called Twig over to his apartment to tell her. He did not know what he will do with his time or how he would make money. The woman said he would find another job and commented on the changes he has made around the apartment since she had last been there. He told the woman that she should not have come.

The woman reflects on her relationship with the man. She had been in a bad place and he had saved her from a figurative drowning, but she later realized that he, too, does not know how to swim. The two look out at the valley in a place they once considered their own. Twig asks why they stayed together so long, and the man tells her not to ask him.