Theo shows up at Joni’s. The girls never followed up on their promise to explain what happened the night Evangeline died, and now, years later, he wants answers. He accuses Joni of having made a career by capitalizing on his family name and spinning a false pretense of radical honesty. Joni is stunned. Over many glasses of wine, Bess and Joni explain the details of the events in Greece that occurred after he and his friends had left. Joni explains that there is nothing special about the night of Evangeline’s death and emphasizes that it was a tragic accident. Theo gets up to leave and tells Bess and Joni that he has a dinner planned to mark the 10-year anniversary of Evangeline’s death. Joni tells him that it is a nice idea, but she does not commit to attending.

Bess continues to unravel as Joni builds an increasingly large media platform in part by writing about Evangeline. Neither girl follows through with their college plans; Bess is too terrified of paparazzi to go to New York University, and Joni is offered a full-time position at Dollface in New York.

After Bess’s brother Steven loses his temper and screams at Bess that her continued inability to cope has the entire family walking on eggshells, Bess seeks Joni for comfort but does not find it, for Joni also thinks that Bess needs to pull herself together. The girls have a massive argument in which Bess blames Joni for insisting that they lie about Evangeline’s death and Joni accuses Bess of wallowing in self-pity. Bess screams that Joni only crafted the lie about both girls being present when Evangeline fell so that Bess would be indebted to her, and it becomes clear that the girls’ friendship is over.

Theo has left his car at Joni’s, and Bess puts on makeup to look marginally better when he returns for the vehicle. When he arrives, however, Joni does not tell Bess, and he is gone again before Bess becomes aware of his presence. She accuses Joni of deliberately trying to keep her and Theo apart, and Joni denies it. Later, Joni tells Bess that her book launch has been rescheduled for the 10-year anniversary of Evangeline’s death. There is to be a televised interview, and she would like Bess to participate. Bess is horror-struck that Joni continues to use the tragedy to bolster her career. Bess reassesses her assertion that the only lie Joni has ever told was the one that helped to cover up the true story of Evangeline’s death.

Steven and Bess arrange to meet and talk with Lucien, Willa’s secret boyfriend. Lucien tells them that Joni was violent and controlling and that he knew from the start that Willa’s relationship with her was doomed, as Willa was too willful to be Joni’s “housecat.” He also tells Bess that he was not with Willa on the night of her death. The entire police case against him hinges on a series of text messages that were supposedly sent between him and Willa that evening. He asserts that the messages were not from Willa herself and that they will never stand up in court.

The first message that Lucien had supposedly received from Willa asked him to meet at the beach. He did not think the text was really from her because it contained a heart emoji. (As a rule, Willa did not use emojis in her messages.) After hearing this, Steven and Bess are even more certain that Joni was involved in Willa’s death. Steven brings Bess to Joni’s house so that she can get her things and leave. There, Bess finds Willa’s phone buried in one of Joni’s bedroom drawers.

Bess is now staying with Steven and Nova. Initially, she refuses to leave her bedroom, but Steven tells her that her behavior resembles her teenage reaction to the tragedy in Greece and is unacceptable for an adult. Bess agrees, and the three share a tense dinner. Afterwards, Bess admits to Steven that she and Joni lied about what happened on the night of Evangeline’s death.

Bess shares the story with Steven, and his response is that it makes little sense for Joni to have placed them both at the scene of the crime. He shakes his head, beginning to put the truth together in his mind. He tells her that he always found it odd that Joni’s initial interview with the police contained so much more detail than Bess’s, as if Joni had seen more of what had happened. He asserts that Joni has never done anything selflessly and that there is no way she would have lied only to protect Bess. He pulls up the transcripts from their interviews and leaves Bess to read them.

Bess reads through both transcripts and is surprised by a key detail in Joni’s. Joni knew that Evangeline had taken off her sandals and was holding them while walking barefoot. There is no way that she could have known that if she had not been with Evangeline at the end, after Evangeline had left Bess. Steven has also noticed this detail. They both realize that Joni has been lying all along.

Bess returns to Joni’s and asks Joni if she had been the one to tell Evangeline about Bess’s plan to travel alone with Theo. Joni admits to this, saying that she knew the plan would end badly and would irrevocably alter their friendship. She claims that for this reason, she did her best to prevent their trip from happening. Joni also admits to being present at the moment when Evangeline fell from the cliff. Joni had run after her to make sure that Evangeline would not reveal that it was Joni, not Theo, who told her about Theo’s plans with Bess. Now, hearing Joni’s confession, Bess feels betrayal and rage. She accuses Joni of ruining her life and then building an entire career on helping similarly disempowered women. She asks about the night that Willa died, but Joni refuses to tell her the truth.

A detective comes to visit Bess at her home. Joni is missing. The detective does not think that Joni was responsible for Willa’s death and blames it on Lucien instead, explaining that neighbors saw Willa alive after a security camera captured Joni en route to Bess’s house. Bess is stunned, but she still wonders why Joni chose to involve her in all of the drama. She wishes that Joni would have left her alone.

Joni has been missing for a month. There have been various sightings, but none of them turned out to be Joni. Bess returns to Joni’s home in Malibu and finds her paddle board gone. Thinking back to Joni’s stated wish to disappear on a paddleboard in the ocean, she wonders if Joni has done just that. It strikes her that disappearing in a grand and dramatic fashion would have been a particularly “Joni” thing to do.

For the next few days, Bess is consumed by thoughts of Joni. The anniversary of Evangeline’s death is only three days away. While listening to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” Bess takes out a photograph of herself with Joni and Evangeline that was taken in Greece that she’d stolen from Joni’s house. She reflects on that summer and realizes that they were all to blame for their small disagreements. As she examines the photograph, she notices that there is another behind it in the frame. It is a candid, un-posed shot of the three girls in their hotel room in Mykonos. In this candid photograph, they more closely resemble who they really were. She wonders if Joni had walked away from her life out of a sense of guilt and she realizes she is finally ready to read Joni’s 2009 essay in Dollface.

In Joni’s book, she explains that the three girls spent a summer in Greece together, chasing past versions of themselves that they knew they were about to lose. She argues that they were all flawed and states that they were “perfectly imperfect women who hurt each other in all the most obvious ways, but who loved each other enough for a lifetime” (354). She tells her readers that Evangeline’s death was a great tragedy, but that she will not allow it to diminish her. She will tell the story again and again in hopes that it will help someone to hear it.

Bess is at Theo’s house for a celebration of Evangeline’s life. She realizes that Theo and his wife Sophia are complex, fully-formed humans, and she feels the power of the past slipping away. She tells Theo the truth about the night that Evangeline died and admits that their fight was not really about Theo, but about the changing nature of their own friendship.

Bess and Theo say their goodbyes, and Bess realizes that she, Joni, and Evangeline had once shared a complex, fragile, imperfect bond and had been complex, fragile, imperfect people. She feels alive for the first time in many years and acknowledges that she is ready to start telling her own story.