Dolores's family receives their first television, an event she later marks as the start of her family's unraveling.

Bernice delivers a stillborn baby, plunging her into a severe depression that destabilizes the entire family.

Tony releases Bernice's beloved parrot Petey in anger, then abandons the family after being fired for an affair.

Bernice's mental health collapses completely, and Dolores is sent to live with her grandmother in Rhode Island.

Jack Speight grooms Dolores over several weeks and then rapes her when she is thirteen years old.

Dolores's mother Bernice is struck by a truck at work and killed.

Dolores arrives at Merton College a week early and is let inside by a dorm worker named Dottie.

Kippy's boyfriend grabs and gropes Dolores at the Halloween party while the surrounding crowd cheers him on.

Dottie manipulates Dolores into sex after the party, and a disgusted Dolores poisons Dottie's fish before leaving.

Dolores strips down and swims beside a dead beached whale at Cape Cod, seriously considering ending her own life.

A man arrives to take Dolores to a psychiatric hospital after Bernice's old friend called for help.

Dolores develops photographs at a photo lab showing Dante as a teacher and moves to Vermont to find him.

Dante demands Dolores get an abortion after she reveals she lied about taking birth control.

Dolores comes home to find Dante half-naked on the couch with his former student and screams at him to leave.

Thayer takes Dolores to Cape Cod whale watching, where a massive humpback breaches the surface and Dolores cries with joy.

Pool 1 traces the most pivotal events of Dolores Price's life, from her earliest memories in the 1950s through her hard-won happiness in adulthood. Her childhood is shaped by her mother Bernice's devastating depression after a stillbirth and her father Tony's eventual abandonment of the family. The defining trauma of her adolescence comes when her neighbor Jack grooms and then rapes her, and her mother's sudden death soon after deepens her already severe self-destruction. Dolores spirals during college, is manipulated and assaulted again, and reaches her lowest point swimming beside a dead beached whale before being taken to a psychiatric hospital. After seven transformative years of therapy, she attempts a new life but falls into another abusive relationship with Dante before finally finding the strength to leave him. The pool closes with Dolores watching a humpback whale breach the ocean surface beside her loving husband Thayer.

Dolores's life-defining traumas and the long road to healing.

Tony takes young Dolores to Fisherman's Cove and tells her about a whale that once got lost in the shallow water.

Dolores's new friend Jeanette teaches her about French kissing, sex, and menstruation for the first time.

Tony touches Dolores inappropriately over her bathing suit while they sit together at the side of the pool.

Bernice sends Dolores a painting from the psychiatric hospital depicting a woman's leg flying on the wings of a parrot.

Dolores frames classmate Rosalie Pysyk for a vulgar textbook drawing by switching their books and confessing to the priest.

Bernice is released from the psychiatric hospital and watches The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Dolores sneaks across the street to befriend Roberta, an older woman who owns a tattoo parlor.

Dolores receives a letter from her future college roommate Kippy and invents an entirely false persona to write back.

A doctor tells Dolores she is overweight and warns she will likely not live past forty if she keeps smoking.

Dolores begins intercepting Dante's love letters to Kippy and secretly keeps the nude photographs he sends along with them.

Dr. Shaw takes Dolores to the hospital pool for a symbolic rebirth therapy session and is accidentally electrocuted.

After visiting her psychic, Dolores draws a detailed portrait on her Etch-a-Sketch of a future husband she has never met.

Dante secretly spends nearly all of Dolores's carefully saved money on a new green van without asking her.

Dolores takes Roberta on a road trip to the eastern coast of Canada to see humpback whales, but they miss the migration.

A frail and dying Mr. Pucci urges Dolores to stop squandering her chance at happiness and commit to marrying Thayer.

Pool 2 explores the significant secondary events that filled in the texture of Dolores's life, from her earliest innocent moments to her late-blooming happiness. Early experiences—her father's strange behavior by the pool, a friend's frank education about sex, and her mother's haunting painting sent from the hospital—planted seeds that would shape Dolores for decades. During her troubled college years, she intercepts letters from a sensitive young man named Dante, a chance encounter that quietly sets her future in motion. Her seven years in therapy introduce her to the healing power of creative expression and a mysterious Etch-a-Sketch portrait she draws of a husband she has yet to meet. She cycles through loss and disappointment, including a road trip with Roberta that fails to find the whales she was seeking, before a dying Mr. Pucci gives her one final push toward happiness.

The hidden moments and quieter details that shaped Dolores's world.

Dolores's grandmother arrives at the family home, but her strict religious approach deepens Bernice's depression rather than helping.

Tony warns Dolores never to tell anyone what happens inside the family home and then permanently abandons the family.

Bernice tells Dolores that Marilyn Monroe was just a scared little girl, quietly revealing how trapped she herself feels.

Jack begins a secret affair with Bernice, which Dolores discovers and never stops resenting her mother for.

Dolores refuses to speak to her father at Bernice's funeral and deliberately burns herself with a flat iron that night.

Dolores visits Mr. Pucci's house unannounced, meets his partner Gary, and realizes for the first time that Mr. Pucci is gay.

Kippy's college boyfriend destroys Dolores's belongings in revenge after the Halloween party, including the canvas of Bernice's painting.

Dolores calls Bernice's old friend from her motel room in Cape Cod, is briefly moved by stories of her mother, then hangs up in anger.

During a therapy session, Dolores finally breaks down and admits her furious, long-buried anger at Bernice for the affair with Jack.

An elderly neighbor touches Dolores's leg in Vermont; she stands her ground, insults him, and jabs a spatula into his hand.

Dolores goes to the abortion clinic, privately names her fetus Vita Marie, and goes through with the procedure to avoid losing Dante.

Dolores marries Dante despite growing to hate him after the abortion, telling herself he will eventually change his mind about children.

Dante finally admits he was fired months earlier for involvement with a student and later strikes Dolores during a rage.

Dolores tells Dante the full truth about her past at a Burger King stop and accuses him of statutory rape.

Dolores receives Mr. Pucci's beloved jukebox as a posthumous gift, invites Thayer over, and proposes marriage to him.

Pool 3 focuses on the pivotal revelations and emotional turning points that redirected the course of Dolores's life at every stage. From the early realization that her grandmother's repressive influence worsened Bernice's condition, to the shocking discovery that Jack was also having an affair with her own mother, each event forces Dolores to confront deeply uncomfortable truths. Her college years end in betrayal and destruction, and her lowest moment at Cape Cod is followed by a crucial breakthrough in therapy where she finally releases her rage at her mother. Her relationship with Dante provides a second cycle of abuse and reckoning, culminating in the moment she finally tells him the entire truth about herself and claims her freedom. The pool ends with Dolores making the brave and joyful decision to propose to Thayer after receiving one last gift from Mr. Pucci.

The discoveries, confrontations, and emotional breakthroughs that redirected Dolores's life.