Sam stands at a strange house, taxi behind him, and he calls the woman behind the door "Mrs. Merlotte." To her credit, she's not wormy about it at all. She feels terrible, she's not all that happy to see him, but she doesn't call him a monster or anything. She tries to be honest. It's a fresh take. There's a baby monitor and family photos on the mantle: None with him. "It'd be hard to explain to friends who think we never had children." She asks him to sit down, and he won't. "We never thought we'd see you again," she says, and he points out that we have the internet now. She's terribly ashamed. "Sam. If you came for an explanation, I don't have a good one. Mitchell and I were down to our last nickel, and we were scared. We still don't know what we saw that night..."

Sam's Daphne pride flares up: "You saw me turn into a dog." It hurts her, physically. It's the end of the world, when things change that much. "And apparently that was worth abandoning me over. So I spent the next nineteen years... Making sure nobody would know who I really was. That's what you left me with." She weeps, apologizing over and over, until he gets uncomfortable and waves it off. "Hey, hey. I'm not here for an apology. I want to find the people you adopted me from. I want to meet my parents." She can't, she says: She swore not to. He goes, "Jesus Christ!" but what he means is, "Um, you also packed up in the middle of the night and left me behind as a child, which I'm fairly certain they would have also asked you not to do, if it had occurred to them what assholes you are."

"Please, trust me," Mrs. Merlotte swears. "You don't want to know them. They're bad people." She will be right, presumably. He points out that she's bad people too, and as she cries the baby monitor starts buzzing. They make their way down the hallway to Mr. Merlotte's room, where he's close to death. He scrawls a note, painful and slow, and Sam watches his eyes; there's still love there. Poor old Sam. He takes the note with shaking hands.