Pip skips school for the first time except illness and stakes out the Bell house from behind a tree. She tells Ravi that Becca has left for her internship at the Kilton Mail and Dawn has gone to work, leaving the house apparently empty. Pip is exhausted after a sleepless night haunted by the anonymous warning text, but she is focused on finding Andie Bell’s hidden burner phone.

When Ravi realizes Pip intends to break into the Bell house, he challenges both the recklessness of the plan and the particular danger to him as Sal Singh’s brother and as a brown teenager entering a white family’s home. Pip immediately recognizes that she has failed to consider the unequal risk Ravi faces and apologizes. She offers to go inside alone while Ravi keeps watch.

Ravi decides that if the burner phone might help clear Sal’s name, he needs to be involved despite the risk. He calls the evidence too important to miss and affirms that he and Pip are partners. Pip explains that she does not intend to break a window; she expects to find a spare key outside because they live in Kilton.

Pip and Ravi cross to the empty house and search typical hiding places for a key: under the mat, above the door frame, in bushes, around lanterns, and behind ivy. Ravi finally finds the spare key hidden in a chrome wind chime beside the door, stuck in place with old Blu-Tack.

Before using the key, Pip takes out yellow rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and gives Ravi a pair of her mother’s floral gardening gloves. Ravi jokes to steady the mood, and Pip prepares herself at the front door. With Ravi ready beside her, Pip inserts the key into the lock and turns it.