A woman from Boston is visiting the archives in a small Southern town for the summer. She attends a yoga class, which she notes is different from her studio in Boston. Here, “people wear cargo shorts and baggy T-shirts…They say oof as they bend.” She is intrigued by “the only other woman in actual yoga pants,” an archeology professor. She imagines what her backstory could be. She begins to see her all over town, but the woman doesn’t seem to recognize her. “In her short time [in this small, Southern town],” she “has felt less and less like herself.” When she learns about a recent scandal in the town—a teenage girl visiting the college for recruitment got assaulted by a soccer goalie—she thinks about her own experience with assault in college, looks up the man who assaulted her then. While his social media presence is sparse, she finds that his wife posts frequently, and then, like the way she imagined the archaeology professor’s, she begins to wonder and fill in the gaps of this woman’s life. She considers writing her an anonymous note telling her what her husband did when they were younger. She wants “[to] make her see that the world is a bad place and the man she married was a terrible boy, whether or not he’s a terrible man.” She then thinks about one of her friends in Boston, how he used to date a girl who only liked to have sex if she was penned down—he “had to pretend to be assaulting her.” The woman from Boston tries to imagine this woman’s life, what else it consisted of to make her only want this kind of sex. She tries to imagine what she looks like, her job, how she positions her body when she stands. She has a dream that she finds out this woman is the archaeology professor. Then she thinks about the woman who her husband has pictures of on his computer, a famous singer. She reads everything she can about this woman on the Internet. She likes one of the woman’s posts just to unlike it, “clicking the little heart to turn it from red to clear.” The woman from Boston goes to a coffee shop and listens as a boy in college is possessive and jealous with his girlfriend. When the girl goes to the bathroom, the woman follows to slip her a note: “This is how the bad stuff starts.” She thinks, continually, of all of these women, how they survive as women, broiled, constantly, in sexuality. She thinks about how “[b]ack home, chasing after kids, working, eating dinner with Wallace, meeting up with George, using her computer only for research, keeping her house organized, keeping her office organized—everything was in its place,” but “[h]ere, her world has become as disordered as her rented room. Everything that’s ever happened to her, everyone she’s ever known, is right there in her laptop, waiting for her to shake the mouse and bring it all to life.” She gets drunk and messages the wife of the man who assaulted her in college. Instead of telling her that he assaulted her, she told her that he’s currently cheating on her, which isn’t true of him but of another man she knows (she’s his mistress). She tries not to feel bad about the message she sent, reasons that “[w]hat she accused him of is far less terrible than what he did, just more recent.” She figures that she feels guilty because “she’s accused the man of it,” who he is now, “and not the boy” who assaulted her back then. She figures she just needs the stability of her life back in Boston and then she’ll stop feeling everything all at once. She goes to the yoga class once more before she leaves town and this time she awkwardly gives the archeology professor twenty dollars because she’s not sure why she feels connected to her or how to express it. Before she leaves, she watches another woman, around “sixty, sixty-five” “eat a salad by herself.” This woman does a number of things after eating: brushes her teeth with a dry brush, stretches, reapplies lipstick. The woman from Boston is “enchanted with this woman’s self-care, her way of doing one thing at a time.” She resists the urge say to her, “Tell me how to live.”