The narrative moves a few months ahead. On a freezing February Sunday, AJ walks toward Brian’s apartment to finally pick a wedding date at his request. Despite being 29, the same age her mother was when she had AJ and Emily, she feels rushed. While passing Hibernia, a neighborhood pub showing the Oscars, she ducks inside to watch the opening monologue and orders a drink.

She watches Noah in the audience with Allison and Eudora. She recalls Eudora once saying that a person only gets one love of their life. When Allison wins Best Supporting Actress and thanks Noah in her speech, AJ orders more beers and a pizza and sends Brian a string of excuses about her delay. She turns off her phone and drinks more while waiting for the award for Best Actor to be presented.

After 11 o’clock, Noah wins an Oscar for Byron, hugs Eudora, kisses Allison’s cheek, and thanks the woman he loves, saying, “[Y]ou know who you are. Hopefully” (314). The camera finds Allison glowing in the audience. AJ cries. She reflects on the years she wasted forcing herself toward other men, envies Emily’s unguarded emotional honesty, and sees clearly that she used Brian as a barrier against simply waiting for Noah.

Just before midnight, she goes to Brian’s apartment, wakes him, and puts her engagement ring in his hand, telling him that she tried as hard as she could to want to be with him. He closes his fingers around it, says he knows, and holds her while she cries.

By May 2013, AJ is 30, has been sober since Oscars night, and is in therapy. When a news alert announces that Eudora has died at 84 from congestive heart failure, AJ realizes that Eudora was already ill when Noah was taking her for blood work at Simmons a year earlier. Libby invites AJ to the memorial after having harshly criticized her for ending her engagement to Brian. AJ reads this as an apology and accepts.

At the packed Grovelawn Manor service, AJ spots both Noah onstage and Allison in the front row with Noah’s agent, Risa, and her husband, Ned. Noah eulogizes Eudora by reciting a passage from Two Gentlemen of Verona and catches AJ’s eye as she cries. Afterward, he follows AJ and Libby outside to invite AJ to Drew House, explaining that as Eudora’s executor, he needs to review the bequests she left specifically for AJ. In Libby’s car, an unexpectedly vulnerable Libby asks what it feels like to love someone the way AJ loves Noah. She then discloses that she intends to leave her husband, Lucas. They spend four hours talking, during which Libby apologizes for judging AJ’s breakup with Brian.

AJ arrives at Drew House at sunset as the last mourners leave. She meets Allison, who’s warm and gracious and not wearing an engagement ring. After Allison, Risa, and Ned leave, AJ is alone with Noah. He shows her a portion of Eudora’s will, which reveals that Eudora has left her and Ezell’s entire intellectual estate jointly to AJ and Noah. A separate clause gives them shared control over Ezell’s unfinished play, Fire & Water, which can only be staged with both their approval.

Noah notices that AJ isn’t wearing her engagement ring. When she confirms that she returned it, he reveals that his relationship with Allison was a media arrangement to sell Byron tickets and that his Oscar speech was addressed to AJ. AJ is furious, accusing him of humiliating her at Blue Con. He argues that he fabricated the Allison story because she was eager for an explanation and that he needed to protect her future from his illness. He accuses her of being in denial about his Huntington’s disease, and she realizes that he’s right. She apologizes and tells him she reads about the disease when she misses him. He says that she deserves children and someone to grow old with, things he can’t provide. When he asks about children directly, AJ admits aloud for the first time that she doesn’t want them. For a moment, Noah looks openly hopeful, but then he retreats because this isn’t his plan for his life. When AJ presses him, he confirms that his plan still includes a physician-assisted death. She accuses him of being secretly vindicated by his diagnosis and of purposefully isolating himself. She challenges him to say what he actually wants, and he pulls her close.

They have sex. Later, they shower together and fall asleep in his bed. Over the days that follow, they settle into a life at Drew House, running, swimming, shopping at T.J. Maxx (a store that Noah claims indifference to but clearly loves), cooking, and rebuilding their ease with each other. He alludes to his illness obliquely, noting that swimming will benefit him as he gets older, and AJ acknowledges the implication without pressing.

Their physical relationship is passionate. AJ works on a screenplay in Eudora’s room, the one space Noah avoids, and reads through Eudora’s notes from the summer of 2000. These reveal that Eudora deliberately used AJ and Noah to push her and Ezell’s unfinished work on “phasing,” a near-telepathic creative state, and had recognized their mutual attraction while working to channel it into performance. Noah refuses to read the notes, not wanting Eudora’s perspective to overwrite his own memories.

As July approaches, Noah’s anxiety intensifies. During a tranquil evening watching a film together, he quietly fights back tears that he refuses to explain. The next morning, AJ finds him attempting to demolish the kitchen cabinets with a sledgehammer, having decided overnight to renovate the entire room. She talks him down by raising structural concerns, but he channels his anxiety into the renovation project obsessively, telling AJ that the kitchen will be hers one day and dismissing the fact that the house legally belongs to his father. AJ opposes the renovation.

At dinner at Patrick and Elle’s, Noah makes a passive-aggressive comment about AJ’s stubbornness, and later in the car, he confesses that he’s jealous of Patrick and Elle for having children. The following day, AJ privately researches reverse vasectomies and genetic-screening options for in-vitro fertilization, concluding that Noah would never pursue any of them on his own. A reading of Eudora’s final archived letter, written just after Noah received his diagnosis in 2000, reveals her anguish at ending the experiment, her conviction that AJ alone could reach Noah, and her fear that AJ’s emerging gifts as a performer wouldn’t survive Noah’s departure.

One day, AJ returns to the house to retrieve a forgotten shopping list and finds the grandfather clock, which had stopped for the entire summer, newly wound and ticking. She follows the sound of Bud whimpering outside Errol’s study to find Noah in crisis. He has just experienced an involuntary loss of control in his right hand. He’s furious to be discovered and orders her to leave. He confesses to living in daily dread and tells her that happiness with her makes the fear worse. She accuses him of using the kitchen renovation to avoid his emotions. He reveals that he knows she has been researching ways for them to have children and reminds her of her long-ago admission that she couldn’t handle caring for his mother. He confirms his intention to die on his own terms; when she calls him a coward, he agrees and orders her out.

AJ retreats to Eudora’s room and thinks. Drawing on Eudora’s note that AJ alone could reach Noah where Eudora could not, she finds the Fire & Water script and proposes that they stage the play for a short run before parting permanently. The ending would be improvised each night, as Eudora originally intended. Noah agrees on the strict condition that they separate for good after the final performance. AJ accepts. Before she can leave his office, he apologizes and pulls her back. They have furious, grief-laden sex.

Fire & Water is the story of two scientist and lovers, F and W. W exhausts herself searching for a cure for F’s terminal illness, while F urges her to simply live alongside him. Unable to cure F, W floods their hilltop home in “Molten Ice” to suspend it outside of time, allowing them to remain together indefinitely—but never leave. The play’s ending is unscripted.

Rehearsals at the Hayes Theater begin in October. Noah, as director, assigns them alternating roles each night so that each can initiate the improvised second act. AJ is intimidated and intensely attracted to him in this mode, but his direction is so clear and generous that she gives herself over to it fully. AJ arranges a two-week leave from SNL. All 12 performances sell out in advance.

Over 12 nights, the improvised second acts become the arguments they can’t finish offstage. AJ forces Noah into a caregiving role, while he forces AJ to play a bitter, resentful woman with a disability who mirrors his mother. She stages a mentor’s suicide and makes him console the bereaved, while he performs an extended, harrowing depiction of advanced Huntington’s symptoms. She tells him that W is miraculously pregnant and makes him build a family he can’t have. After this last performance, he takes Bud and disappears for the night. Their connection inside the play deepens with every performance. Outside it, Noah quietly removes his belongings from AJ’s apartment.

For their final performance, Noah stages an alien-themed prequel in which his character, a being with a hereditary illness, must leave Earth to protect his human love. The set revisits the Romeo and Juliet scene they read during their first time acting together and closes with both characters declaring, in character, the love they have held since they were 17. As Noah’s character turns to go, AJ breaks the frame, calling his real name. The lights come back up. She begs him to take her with him. He tells her, in front of the audience, that her presence makes life so worth living that, when the time comes, he won’t be able to go through with his plan. She swears that she will stay with him and help him when the moment arrives. For one instant, he’s fully present with her. Then, he tears their connection apart and walks into the wings.

AJ is left alone onstage. After the curtain falls, she can’t find Bud backstage. Back on the empty stage, she feels stripped of any future. She experiences suicidal ideation as she moves toward the exit. At that moment, Emily calls because she can’t sleep. AJ lies down on the stage and holds onto her sister’s voice as Emily talks about an old episode of Astronauticals. The warmth of Emily’s presence steadies her as she pulls back from the edge. A noise in the rafters is followed by Bud sprinting across the stage and then Noah stepping out of the wings. He walks toward AJ and extends his hand, and she places her hand in his.

The narrative moves two years ahead. In the summer of 2015, AJ and Noah are on the set of the Into the Blue sequel, which AJ wrote and Noah is directing under their production company, Mooncalf Pictures. Although a massive fan Kickstarter didn’t contribute significant funds, it convinced the studio to green-light the film. Their characters, Ana and Rho, will sacrifice themselves in the final scene, a story decision that AJ and Noah fought to keep over the studio’s objections.

Noah’s hand tremors are now consistent, though they’re still subtle enough that only AJ notices. Both are wearing their wedding bands during the shoot. They were married in a small backyard ceremony at Drew House, officiated by Storm. In the months following the play, they shared AJ’s apartment before spending a summer in Spain shooting a film. When their relationship went public via a paparazzi photo, AJ struggled with the loss of her privacy. Faced with the prospect of returning to SNL, she had an anxiety attack, and the sequel opportunity became her path out. Mooncalf Pictures now has multiple projects in development, deliberately building Noah toward more work behind the camera.

Patrick and Elle are now among Noah’s closest confidants after he disclosed his diagnosis to them, and both couples have supported each other. Noah also quietly repaid the remainder of Patrick and Elle’s debt after joining the family. Libby now has a girlfriend named Melissa, a former nurse who persuades Libby to watch Astronauticals. Emily now has a dedicated guest suite at Drew House, and the three of them spend many weekends together. Bud died at 14, and they have since adopted Mac, a shepherd mix, named after Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Noah plans to go public with his diagnosis at 40, transition to stage work, and take nothing for granted.

On the film set, AJ and Noah walk to their marks hand in hand. Noah calls action, and they run together into the scene.