A year and nine months later, Naomi and Nicholas are engaged and miserable. Naomi gets a ride home from her job at the Junk Yard (an oddities shop) from her coworker Leon on a rainy night—her car has a flat tire and she’s refused to ask Nicholas to change it because she’s claimed to be able to do all her car maintenance for months and won’t give him the satisfaction of catching her in a lie. She knows he’s suspicious, though, which infuriates her because “he should assume that all of [her] lies are true” (11).

Naomi hopes Nicholas won’t be home when she gets there, silently grousing about how attentive he is to his overbearing mother, Deborah, every day. When Leon pulls into their driveway, Nicholas has just arrived, and Naomi prays he doesn’t notice her very obvious flat tire. Brandy, one of Naomi’s coworkers, hosts a game night every Friday, and Leon asks Nicholas if he’ll join them this time. Naomi scoffs because Nicholas never attends, but he says he’ll be there just to spite her. Leon drives away, calling goodbye to Naomi, and the kindness in his voice makes Naomi freeze. For almost two years, she’s been trying to change herself to become the wife she believes Nicholas wants instead of who she is, and the kindness in Leon’s voice makes her feel like her old self again, even if only for a moment.

Inside the house, Nicholas gripes about his car, work, and a handful of other things. Naomi tunes him out, nodding and smiling at important points while she tries to hold herself together. The wedding is in three months. Rather than excited, she feels like she’s hurtling toward a future she doesn’t want. Nicholas proposed after 11 months of dating. The two moved in together shortly after, and ever since, Naomi has felt like “signing up for Boyfriend Nicholas and inheriting Fiancé Nicholas later on was some legitimate bait-and-switch” (19).

Nicholas continues griping about his boss, who says he never goes above and beyond. Naomi silently agrees. She’s hurt that Nicholas didn’t get her a gift for their anniversary or Valentine’s Day—he claimed that their love is so real that they don’t need to mark it with frivolous occasions. Naomi notes that he does get gifts for his mother regularly. Nicholas decides to show up his boss by bringing in homemade cookies the next day, even though he isn’t scheduled to work this month’s Saturday shift. Though he knows tonight is Naomi’s game night, he asks her to bake some cookies. When Naomi says no, Nicholas preheats the oven and gets out mixing bowls for her.

Naomi suggests he ask his mother to bake cookies for him. In response, Nicholas tells her Deborah took care of fixing last-minute measurements for the flower girl’s dress, emphasizing that they should both be “just so glad, that they’re able to help us out” (26). Since Nicholas’s mother vetoed the wedding dress Naomi wanted and offered maid-of-honor to Nicholas’s sister, Naomi is not grateful at all. At this point, though, she’s too prideful to back out and look like a failure, so she puts up with Nicholas’s attitude and his parents’ passive aggressiveness, taking comfort in the knowledge that she makes Nicholas as miserable as he makes her.

Game night is full of tension that Naomi tries and fails to smooth over. While Brandy and Leon don’t mind Nicholas, Zach and Melissa, Naomi’s other coworkers, can’t stand him. In particular, Zach gets under Nicholas’s skin, telling him he enjoys being “an asshole.” Nicholas rebuts by calling the Junk Yard a failure. Zach reminds him that Naomi works there too, which Nicholas dismisses by saying, “I make plenty of money. Naomi doesn’t need a job” (36). At this, Naomi is no longer able to pretend she’s the perfect, in-love fiancée. She casually suggests she could move to another town to work for a diner her employers own if the Junk Yard closes, and her friends look at her as if she’s a new person who’s grown a backbone.

At home, Nicholas acts jovial, as if the argument at game night never happened, leaving Naomi to swallow her anger so she doesn’t look petty. She reminds herself of the computer file she has with the reasons she loves him, but they feel worn out and don’t help rekindle her feelings. Nicholas informs her that his mother changed the flowers for their wedding and then asks Naomi if there’s anything she wants to tell him or back out of. Naomi realizes Nicholas has been using his mother as a weapon against her to force her to call off the wedding so he doesn’t have to be the bad guy. At once, Naomi loses any remaining love she has for him, but she doesn’t call off the wedding because “[her] engagement to Nicholas Rose is a game of chicken” (48).