This time, Amanda is real. Kind and slicing in the same voice, a real woman, his real wife. Telling him truth with so much love it barely hurts at all: "That crazy confidence of yours is just the side you let everyone see. This side, what's going on right now? This fear and this anxiety? That is always there. That is always with you. It eats at you, you overcome it. And it gives you forward momentum. That's how you work. Without that, I don't think your little empire would exist." So in essence, Daniel asks, she's saying he exploits his own fear to get what he wants? "You exploit anything that isn't nailed down. That's my theory."

She smiles when she says it. What she's really saying is something the program still wouldn't understand how to say: When you look into my eyes, she's saying, I see all of you. The bright and shining bits and the ugliest parts you can barely see yourself. "The truth hurts, pal," she says, but they both know it doesn't. Not really. Not in any places that don't deserve better. She would come home now, today, if she weren't making secret plans and avenging their daughter and saving the world in ways she can't tell him about yet. But they do kiss, and they make love. And you're thinking, and he's thinking, what if this is all in the holoband and it was never real? But it is, and it was, and they are knitting themselves back together.

Amanda gets a text and leaves him sleeping; Clarice calls somebody and asks her where she is. Amanda walks through the park, to meet someone; Clarice pulls out a knife, to meet someone. Amanda walks past a stand of trees; Clarice stalks someone past a stand of trees. In the sunlight Mar-Beth's hair is nearly as bright as Amanda's. Clarice slits her throat from behind, drops the knife; Amanda retrieves her new tech from the bench where Jordan left it. Olaf and Nestor dispose of the body while Clarice walks the baby home in its pram, his mother's blood still staining his mother's hands.