Rowan digs in the garden and tries to bury Mona

Rowan’s attempt to dig up the remains of Emaleth and Lasher and later bury Mona beneath a tree is a stark expression of her mental collapse, in which memories of the past become an immediate threat in the present. Her search in the garden and her repeated insistence that Mona is dead reveal how the secrets surrounding the remains have become inseparable from Rowan’s perception of her cousin.

Withdrawal and the search

The episode begins after Rowan has spent hours lying on a bed, whispering and refusing to speak with Michael, change for bed, or eat and drink. Michael follows the earlier advice to stay beside her: he holds her and sings melancholy songs, a practice he associates with his Irish heritage and recognizes as shared by the Mayfairs. He falls asleep beside Rowan; when he wakes, she is gone.

Michael finds her barefoot on the lawn beneath an oak, still dressed in a silk suit and using one of the gardener’s large shovels. She is digging where the remains of Emaleth and Lasher had been. As she digs, she speaks to herself about them and curses herself. When Michael tries to stop her, she strikes him. His reminder that the remains have already been removed does not resolve the crisis: Rowan had arranged for a team to search the ground after Mayfair Medical was completed, but the earlier excavation has not settled her fixation.

The buried history returns

Rowan’s garden search is tied to an earlier episode that Michael recalls as a day when she was already behaving erratically and repeating herself. She said she belonged in the Talamasca, and its members sifted through the dirt in a search Michael likens to archaeological work. The search and the remains’ removal provide a concrete history behind Rowan’s return to the same ground; her digging reopens what the family had attempted to locate, remove, and put behind it.

Mona recognizes the reference to Emaleth and Lasher, saying that she was present when it happened. Her recognition links Rowan’s private crisis to shared family memory: Mona is not an uninvolved observer, but someone who knows the events Rowan is reliving. The secrets leave both women caught in the consequences of what happened, while Michael’s account of the garden and its aftermath makes him the witness trying to contain the crisis.

Mistaking Mona for the dead

Later, Rowan sits alone at a table, staring ahead as though she does not recognize the narrator. When she looks at Mona, she rises and tells Michael to get her, then runs around the table and insists that Mona is dead. Rowan says they will bury her under the tree and calls for the shovel. Michael catches Rowan in his arms as she moves toward Mona; Mona retreats into a corner while Quinn struggles to hold her.

Rowan repeats that they must dig deep and bury Mona so she never comes back. The repetition gives the scene its terrifying logic: the earlier search for the remains has become a plan to bury a living family member whom Rowan perceives as already dead. Mona answers Rowan with grief and anger, accusing her of having known who took her daughter and of having allowed it to happen. That accusation reveals a further fracture beneath the immediate confrontation: Mona connects Rowan’s apparent hostility to the loss of her child and to Michael, whom Mona says Rowan resented sharing with her.

Consequences and significance

Michael’s attempt to care for Rowan—remaining beside her, holding her, singing to her—does not prevent her from leaving the bed or digging in the garden. Nor can he bring her back to ordinary recognition when she turns on Mona; he can only catch and restrain Rowan as the danger becomes immediate. Quinn’s effort to hold Mona likewise cannot repair the breach between the two women. The episode leaves their family history active in the present, not safely confined to the removed remains.

The oak, shovel, and repeated demand to bury Mona bind Rowan’s search for the past to a present-tense threat. Digging is first an effort to recover what was already taken from the ground; in Rowan’s later outburst, burial becomes the solution she imagines for Mona. The reversal shows the breakdown not simply as private disorientation but as a crisis shaped by shared secrets, bereavement, and Rowan’s inability in that moment to distinguish the living person before her from the dead she is trying to bury.