At work in a museum gallery, Gordon chats lightly with a colleague, Amy, about Wordle, then takes his habitual walk through the hushed exhibition rooms. He recalls how his sponsor Rob helped him shift from high-pressure banking to managing a digital team at the gallery, a quieter role that still connects him to art.

A flashback recounts meeting Comfort in 2019 on a stalled train; they began dating, and Gordon grew close to Comfort’s teenage daughter, Ida, whose teasing “Gord” became affectionate. When the pandemic began, Ida suggested he stay with them; the three fell into a domestic rhythm that continued as Gordon moved in permanently. Gordon told Comfort about his breakdown and childhood, and Comfort reframed his guilt by comparing his past credulity to a child believing in Santa, helping him forgive his younger self.

The narrative shifts to Cora alone at Swan Lake, where the “Dance of the Cygnets” evokes her disciplined ballet past and illuminates parallels to her painful marriage: hope, sacrifice, and disappointment. Now 68, Cora lives contentedly in a small West London terrace, tending plants, sharing herb bundles with neighbors, savoring radio voices, and still startling at loud noises, reminders of long abuse. During lockdown, her children offered help she could not practically accept, and she reflected that this isolation was lighter than the decades-long “lockdown” of her marriage.

Cora remembers how Gordon, after returning home post-accident, began subtly defending her and building a quiet alliance: a pointed remark to his father, sharing contraband chocolate, teaching her to zoom on a phone image of Michelangelo, and accepting a lower-paid gallery job despite his father’s barbs. When Gordon finally moved out, he buried an emergency phone and money for Cora. Immediately after, the abuse escalated: a pressure cooker blew, she was assaulted, and she hid her injuries.

A week later, Gordon returned with his father’s keys. He revealed he had hidden cameras in the smoke detectors and had confronted his father with the uploaded footage, offering a choice between immediate departure with discretion or exposure and prison. He handed Cora the keys, explained the house would be signed over to her, and freed her from her husband. Cora briefly re-entered the house alone, wary, then saw her husband only once more at the divorce meeting, where her children flanked her in silence. Noticing food stains on his shirt, she felt less fear, seeing his fallibility.

In the present, during a family holiday in Spain with Comfort, Ida, Cora, Maia, and Kate, Gordon visits a gallery to see Goya’s Black Paintings, especially Saturn Devouring His Son, which he had once discussed despairingly with Maia. The audio guide’s note that Jupiter escaped and later overthrew his father reframes the image: Gordon now reads Saturn’s face as desperation and fear, not invincible rage. He feels relief and recognition that his and Cora’s liberation had been latent in the story all along. He leaves the gallery and crosses the park to rejoin his family.