Adeline comes to in the forest after her bargain, sitting on wet leaves beneath a moonlit sky. She checks herself for signs the spell worked and finds no visible change, only a lingering dizziness that fades. Still, Adeline resolves that she will not marry Roger or return to the life chosen for her; from now on, her life will be her own.

Crossing the field back to Villon, Adeline is unnerved by the silence and darkness, as if the wedding night never happened. At home, she calls for her mother, but her mother recoils in fear and demands to know who she is. When Adeline tries to say her name—Adeline, Addie, even LaRue—her throat locks and the words will not come, though she can speak anything else.

Adeline’s father enters and reacts with the same alarm, insisting they have no child. Interpreting Adeline’s resemblance as something unnatural, her mother calls her cursed while clutching her cross. Her father drags Adeline to the door and forces her out, sadness on his face only in the way one mourns something already lost, before bolting the house against her.

Desperate, Adeline runs to Estele and pleads for help, reciting intimate details of Estele’s life in hopes of being recognized. Estele refuses her as a “clever spirit” and warns that “the darkness plays its own game” and that Adeline has already lost. After Estele shuts the door, she reopens it moments later with no memory of the exchange, asking again whether Adeline is a spirit or a stranger; Adeline answers “a stranger” because it is the only way to avoid immediate rejection.

Left with nowhere to go, Adeline returns to the forest and tries to summon the darkness, demanding that it show itself. The replies she remembers—his refusal to be commanded, his reminder that he is not bound to her—only underline her helplessness when he does not appear. Adeline stumbles, breaks down, and curls into the earth, telling herself it must be a dream that will pass, while the binding word from the bargain echoes in her mind: Done.