Lola visits Pepper and asks for help with a school essay on Hamlet. Pepper explains that Hamlet’s “fall of a sparrow” speech is about fate, destiny, and knowing what one can and cannot control. Later, Pepper’s children—Alice, Darcy, and Max—hold a Zoom meeting to discuss her pregnancy. Concluding that losing her pregnancy naturally is unlikely, they decide Pepper must travel out of state for an abortion. After debating several destinations, they settle on New York City. Alice immediately books flights, a hotel, and a clinic appointment for one week from tomorrow. She sternly warns everyone that the trip must remain a “highly classified, extremely clandestine secret” to protect her legal career and reputation from severe repercussions in Texas (109). A reluctant Pepper agrees to the plan.

On Halloween, Dr. Blankman calls Pepper and requests she come to his office alone. During the appointment, he warns that the risks of an abortion for a woman her age are serious and unknown, citing heightened dangers of infection, hemorrhage, embolism, and cancer, and stating that no one has ever performed the procedure on a patient her age. He then threatens her, warning that if she seeks an abortion out of state, her physician, Dr.