In August 1714, Addie reaches Paris overwhelmed by its heat, filth, and crowds, and searches for lodging with only a few copper sols hidden in a stolen coat. After several rejections, a matron rents her a dingy room for a week’s pay in advance; Addie asks for proof of payment, but the woman insists she never forgets a face. Addie locks the door, sets her small wooden bird on the sill, and tries to sleep.

Before the night is even over, the matron returns with a man, denies ever admitting Addie, strikes her, and throws her out. Addie cannot prove she paid, because the curse makes her forgettable, and the matron’s brief uncertainty vanishes. The wooden bird is tossed after her, cracking on the stones; unlike Addie’s small injuries, it does not repair itself.

After a grim, restless wait for dawn under an awning, Addie follows the smell of food to a market and tries to steal a bread roll. A baker catches her, and Addie pays her last coin to avoid the men-at-arms, leaving with only a crust of bread, a broken bird, and no money. She eats by the Seine, realizes she has been waiting for rescue that will never come, and forces herself to keep moving and observing the city she must learn to survive in.

Addie is repeatedly mistaken for a prostitute and, desperate, drifts to the docks at dusk. A man demands her price; Addie names one, and he takes her roughly, turning her first time into an act of pain and panic. He throws coins at her afterward, and Addie vomits into the river, horrified by what her “freedom” is costing.

Time shifts forward through Addie’s first brutal months: hunger that never dulls, winter cold that drives her back to the docks, and a wave of sickness that fills death carts. Exhausted, Addie collapses in an alley and later wakes buried under sacks in darkness, only to realize she has been loaded into a cart with corpses; she claws her way out, terrifying onlookers and workers who do not remember her. When the cart leaves, Addie discovers her pockets are empty—the wooden bird has been taken with the dead—leaving her grieving but also relieved, the last tether to Villon severed and her freedom made absolute.