Driving to a party at Stella’s parents’ estate, Tyler—as Theo—takes in the neighborhood’s extravagant wealth. He reflects on his actual plan, which he has kept from Stella: He is not interested in recruiting rich clients for their own sake. His real targets are the staff, accountants, and hired help surrounding his father’s inner circle—people he can bribe or blackmail for information to dismantle his father’s empire piece by piece.

When Stella confirms that her parents’ business partner is present at the party, Tyler realizes his father is there. The knowledge floods him with barely controlled fury and anticipation. He asks Stella to bring Blake, who has also shown up and is furious about the debt transfer, to a private study inside the house.

Blake immediately throws a punch at Tyler upon entry. Tyler blocks it, pins him to the wall, and twists his arm until Blake cries out. Blake demands the deal be undone and insists on paying his own debt. Stella pleads with her brother to accept the situation, warning that Tyler could’ve made things far worse. Tyler releases Blake, who attacks again. Tyler hits him in the kidney, dropping him to the floor. He holds Stella back from helping, warns that the injury should keep Blake in line, then shoves her out of the study and locks the door behind him.

Waiting anxiously outside the locked study, Stella hears only murmured voices. When Tyler finally emerges, Blake is visible in the background, seated and subdued. Tyler refuses to let Stella speak to her brother and steers her away. The ease with which Tyler handled the violence drives home how little she could do to protect herself if he ever turned on her. When he pins her against a wall and warns her not to make him hurt her, she nearly decides to confess everything to her parents, but pulls back.

The tense moment is broken when Stella’s mother, Georgie, discovers them. Tyler instantly transforms, switching on a cultured charm that stuns Stella. He wins Georgie over further by recognizing a rare Berthe Morisot painting in the hallway—a work the family acquired under remarkable circumstances and never publicly reproduced. Stella suspects he researched her family far more thoroughly than she realized and extracts him before her perceptive mother can sense anything wrong.

On the back lawn, Tyler and Stella bicker and discover a 10-year age difference—she is 35, and he is 25. When she claps a hand over his mouth mid-joke, her father Phil walks up and mistakes the gesture for playful couple behavior. He mentions that the party is for Tippi, and the elderly dog wanders over to be greeted affectionately by Stella. Tyler is floored to realize the elaborate party is for the family’s dog.

As the party stretches toward twilight, Tyler stands alone, disgusted by the shallow conversations around him. His attention keeps drifting to Stella, who has barely eaten—her refusal of food stirring unwanted memories of real hunger from his past.

His father, Richard, approaches him, and Tyler conceals his rage through the entire exchange. Richard speaks warmly about Stella, calling her a good person who has worked hard to right her past mistakes. Tyler dismisses this entirely. When Richard moves on, Tyler goes inside to find Stella.

In the kitchen, he spends 10 minutes charming the catering chef, Tori Ahmadi, with seemingly innocent questions about the McCormick family. Tori mentions, half-joking, that Stella may be letting the air out of Cordelia’s car tires out front. Tyler recalls Cordelia making a rude comment about Stella’s tattoos earlier.

Outside, Tyler finds Stella elbow-deep in an engine, following a YouTube tutorial on disabling a car. He startles her deliberately; she lurches up and cracks her head on the hood. After checking she is not badly hurt, he shows her a more effective method—tampering with the mass airflow sensor. Before she can try it, a couple heads toward the driveway. Tyler shuts the hood, lifts Stella onto it, and kisses her to provide cover. The kiss turns aggressive, with Stella biting his lip until it bleeds and Tyler reflecting: “Stella kissed me like she was trying to punish me” (102). After the couple drives past, they separate and trade sharp insults. Stella storms back inside, and Tyler takes his leave.

Five days after the party, Stella is in the grip of a bad gastritis flare triggered by the stress of her arrangement with Tyler. Managing symptoms through bland food, yoga, and strict caffeine limits, she walks through the humid city to visit a patient at Johnson Memorial Hospital.

The patient is Runa Lund, a woman in her early forties recovering from surgery to reduce phantom pain in her amputated legs. As Stella looks at Runa’s wires and tubes, her mind returns to an accident seven years earlier. Her former friend Madison Clyde—Maddie—was driving when she jumped a curb and struck Runa. Maddie fled immediately, and her family’s lawyers worked to pin the blame on Stella. Criminal charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but Stella chose to accept liability in a civil suit, resulting in a 10-million-dollar settlement that made her responsible for all of Runa’s ongoing medical bills.

Runa interrupts Stella’s spiraling and brings her back to the present. Stella tells Runa everything—the debt, Blake’s gambling, the blackmail arrangement, the two kisses—and admits that playing Tyler’s girlfriend has made her aware of how isolated she has become.

Runa proposes that rather than resisting the arrangement, Stella could direct Tyler toward the worst people in their social circle—those who have committed real harm and escaped accountability—naming Maddie, the Bluhms, the Montgomerys, the Hatchers, and fraudster Vincent Prout. Stella hesitates, worried the plan could undo years of therapeutic progress, but her anger at the injustice Runa and others have suffered wins out. The two women agree to draft a list of targets, with Maddie’s name at the top.

While exchanging texts with Stella about an upcoming party, Tyler scouts a potential new venue with two urban explorers. The location is a network of underground tunnels used during Prohibition by bootleggers—the tunnels still bear bullet holes and remnants of liquor storage. At the end lies a large stone room, once a bank basement and later a warehouse raided by federal agents. Tyler envisions transforming it into a speakeasy-style casino and mentally runs through the logistical hurdles.

That evening, Tyler arrives early at Stella’s tattoo shop, taken aback by its dense, macabre decor. When he introduces himself to her two employees as Stella’s boyfriend, they are visibly stunned. He seizes the moment, spinning a fabricated story: Stella is deeply insecure about their relationship, feels unworthy, and could use their reassurance. The employees are moved and resolve to be kinder to her. Tyler is quietly amused, knowing Stella will find their sudden sympathy infuriating.

Stella comes downstairs to find Tyler laughing with her employees, Elayne and Shaunté, who are uncharacteristically warm and complimentary toward her. She immediately suspects Tyler has manipulated them but says nothing, deciding to play the devoted girlfriend rather than give him the satisfaction of a reaction. She tells the employees they can close up and leaves with him.

The moment they are out of sight of the shop, Tyler drops the act. Suspicious of her sudden cooperation, he threatens to escalate their fake relationship to an engagement if she is planning to undermine him, then delivers a warning before peeling away from the curb at a dangerous speed. Stella, whose trauma around car accidents stems from the night Runa was hit, panics and begs him to slow down. He does.

In the tense quiet that follows, Stella notices boxes of crackers and snacks in the back seat. Tyler tells her flatly that growing up without reliable food access leaves a mark, and he always keeps something on hand. The admission reshapes her understanding of his earlier comments about her not eating—what she had read as cruelty may have been anxiety rooted in his own past. She apologizes; he rejects her pity.

Stella directs him to the evening’s party: the annual death-day dinner hosted by her great-aunt, Cordelia Fentwick, held every year on the anniversary of her late husband’s death, with proceeds going to lung cancer research, though he died of a stroke. Tyler finds it absurd. He taunts Stella about her resemblance to Cordelia, then pivots to accusing her of using her family’s money to escape consequences for running someone over. As he pushes harder, Stella’s composure fractures, and she screams that she was not the one behind the wheel.

Stella bolts from the car the moment it stops. Tyler follows, already regretting that he let his anger turn her into a target. He bribes the valets to look away, picks Stella up, hauls her into the shadows, and demands an explanation. She reveals that her fingerprints were not found on the driver’s side of the car, but Maddie’s were—a fact suppressed by Maddie’s legal team. Tyler realizes his private investigator missed this and that Stella may be telling the truth.

Inside, Stella’s parents greet them. When Georgie quietly asks about Runa and Phil asks about her recent surgery, Tyler connects the dots: Stella has been voluntarily covering Runa’s medical expenses even after being cleared of criminal charges. He begins reassessing his view of her.

Stella then spots Maddie across the room. Before Stella can retreat, Maddie cuts her off and stages a public confrontation, performing distress for the watching crowd, suggesting Stella’s behavior had been caused by addiction, and demanding an apology. Tyler whispers to Stella that it is a trap, sends her away, and leads Maddie toward the entryway. Once clear of the crowd, he drops the act entirely, telling her he knows about the suspicious death of a girl named Emily in Turks and Caicos and that her parents paid to have the coroner’s report falsified. Maddie flees after Tyler tells her to stay away for a few months.

Tyler finds Stella pacing furiously in a study. She throws a paperweight at him, then attacks him directly. He restrains her against the door and lets her bite his shoulder through his jacket without pulling away, recognizing she has earned the outlet. He then tells her he believes her about the accident. Stella breaks down, and he pulls her against him.

She pushes back on why she should trust him. To demonstrate good faith, he promises her debt will stay at $3 million no matter what and correctly deduces she has been settling Runa’s bills privately and out of pocket. He explains that his motivation mirrors hers: People like Bradley Bluhm have operated above the law for too long. He almost kisses her but stops himself. They argue, trade insults, and eventually reach an uneasy truce—he will try to be nicer. Stella agrees to partner with him for the night, but on her terms: The real targets are not the older guests but their bored, thrill-seeking children and grandchildren, accessible at a later after-party elsewhere on the grounds.