Even in the Boatwrights’ garden, Lily doesn’t feel completely safe from the threats of the outside world. Kidd uses an allusion and hyperbole to show how Lily’s fear rises while she sits alone near May’s wall and lets her thoughts drift toward the sky above her:

I sat on the ground with my back against the stones and my head tilted back so I could see the stars with all the spy satellites mixed in. Maybe one of them was taking my picture this very minute. They could spot me even in the dark. Nothing was safe. I would have to remember that.

The allusion to “spy satellites” connects Lily’s general anxiety about being discovered in her lies to the Cold War climate of the 1960s. The media bombarded Americans with information—both facts and propaganda—about the threat of Russia spying on them and/or attacking from space with nuclear weapons. As she sits in the garden in South Carolina Lily imagines there are malicious machines watching her from above. The hyperbole in her thinking appears when it occurs to her that a satellite might be “taking [her] picture this very minute.” This exaggeration shows how exposed she feels, and how fragile after weeks of running and lying. It’s already clear to the reader that Lily sees the outside world as threatening and intrusive. She seems to be teetering toward paranoia in this moment, where she seems to think that “nothing is safe” and that distant forces could reach and harm her.