Juliette is in the airlock between the holding cell and the outside. She looks down at her suit as she is about to be sent to cleaning and wonders how she got there. 

Days earlier, as sheriff, Juliette sits in the holding cell with her work, having been driven there by Marnes’s grief and anger. She looks at the view of the outside and wonders what compels people to want to go out. She herself loves the silo. She starts to understand, however, that the views of the outside might lead to “inevitable questions,” making it “important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all” (127).

Juliette looks through a folder on the case of the murder of her former lover, which was found to be an accident. This is the case on which Juliette helped, impressing Marnes. Next, she opens the folder on Holston and wonders what drove him to clean. She obsesses over these two closed cases rather than the open ones that require her attention. Juliette feels a bond with Holston; she lost her lover like he lost his wife.