She’s right, of course, but so what?

“Everything isn’t about money,” Renata tells Amabella. “Well, it is, but it isn’t,” she adds, which is the truest statement she can make after losing her house, her status, her magazine spread and everything else she has worked for — all while trying to keep it together for her daughter, who feels as if her world were literally ending. But not today. Renata and Amabella splash around in the sun one last time in their pool, yelling, “hello!” to the ocean, momentarily forgetting about the packed up boxes in the house.

But sometimes playing hooky doesn’t work. Although she tells Ziggy she has to spend the morning at the aquarium, Jane actually spends much of the day at home with Corey, day drinking, dancing and attempting to have lighthearted first-time sex. But just as quickly as the mood strikes her, the trauma Perry left her with takes over, and she collapses into tears.

Madeline, meanwhile, is trying to keep her marriage to Ed together in what was one of the few moments of comic relief in this episode. She drags Ed up to Big Sur for that couples workshop, imploring him the whole way to keep an open mind. But after one asinine icebreaker involving impromptu hugs with strangers — “for about the length of a nice inhale, exhale” — the two bail.

Back in the car, Ed lays out his impossible choice: to leave the marriage with his dignity intact, or stay with a woman he can no longer trust. Madeline, at least so she says, wants nothing more than for Ed to choose the latter. She can’t say for sure that she won’t screw up again, but she promises that it won’t be by cheating. All her future mistakes, she says, will be “brand-new ones.”

Finally, no one knows more about keeping it together than Bonnie, who has been doing it her whole life. She survived her mother’s abuse and her father’s passivity, and now she’s fighting to hold on through the guilt of having killed someone, and through the looming danger of a blown cover.

And now, all five women must keep it together — and not crack — for the sake of the lie they’ve been telling for more than a year. If they have to perjure themselves, they will perjure themselves. That’s the plan. Stick to the story, Madeline insists during the group huddle at the beach. How could lawyers possibly prove they were lying?