The primary scenes — the ones we saw from both Cole’s and Alison’s point of view — were Alison’s weekly supervised visit with Joanie, to which Cole tagged along; Joanie’s elaborate fifth birthday party at Cole and Luisa’s house, to which Alison was invited; and a late-night visit by Cole to Alison, initially angry and eventually, well, consummated.

Alison’s state of mind was the constant question. On the visit, at a playground in a park, Cole saw her as dangerously inattentive, letting Joanie climb too high on the monkey bars. Alison saw the same incident differently — Joanie gained confidence from walking across the bars (though it looked pretty dangerous to this neutral observer) while Cole and the supervising social worker were obliviously chatting.

Viewpoints diverged even further at the birthday party. Joanie definitely fell from the back of an animal, but everything else was up for grabs. In Alison’s telling, the beast was an inappropriately large horse; in Cole’s, it was a little pony. In Cole’s view, he magnanimously prevented Luisa from running to Joanie’s side, so that Alison could get there first. In Alison’s, she had a panic attack (presumably triggered by memories of her first child’s death) and stood paralyzed after Joanie fell. She’d been right about the danger, but wasn’t able to do anything to help Joanie, because everyone’s against her.

Then, after both Alison and Cole were visited by the New Jersey cops investigating the attack on Noah, Cole stormed into Alison’s house and accused her of betraying him. In his view, this turned into an angry exchange about her pattern of behavior in which she hotly defended herself. (And it was hard not to sympathize with Alison when she yelled, referring to Joanie: “I did not abandon her. I left her with her father. You cannot imagine how much I hate myself for what I did.”) In Alison’s view, it turned into a tender moment in which she showed him the Etsy-worthy dollhouse she’d built by hand as Joanie’s birthday present. In both tellings, Cole, without warning, moved in for a kiss, and pretty soon the clothes were coming off, “Affair”-style.

For those with a crush on Cole, the episode was a subtle reminder that this is the guy who gets angry and waves guns around. In his chapter he was warm and sympathetic, trying to be accommodating to Alison whenever possible. In her chapter, he was cold, aloof and accusatory, not to mention under Luisa’s thumb. Luisa, in Cole’s point of view, was industrious and capable — those non-Alison-like qualities that attract him — but there were clearly cracks in the facade of their domestic bliss. In Alison’s point of view she was harsh and unforgiving — until the morning after Alison slept with her husband, when Luisa came to tell her that she could have an unsupervised visit on Joanie’s actual birthday. Maybe there was some guilt at play in Alison’s suddenly softer view.