The TT stash code tries to examine what it's being used on to see if it should be called as a method or as a hash. It works iteratively, so it will call $self->my_method, and then call ->get_age on that. I don't use Contextual::Return so I don't know what it's looking for, but it sounds like actual method chaining may be needed in order to make it work, and TT will not do that when evaluating dot notation.