Raff thinks about whale hearts and about the sounds he chases beneath the sea. He treasures two things above all else: the violin his mother gave him and the hydrophone his father saved to buy him. He dives in harsh conditions to record underwater sound because he longs to hear whales sing, and when he does catch that music, the wonder of it is followed by furious grief that his mother is not there to share it, leaving him with loneliness.

In that loneliness, Raff first meets Alex in the communications building while playing his violin over a humpback recording. Alex, a young American researcher studying fur seals, asks Raff to keep playing and genuinely admires what he hears. Their connection grows through fieldwork, seal tagging, dives for sound, and Alex's encouragement of Raff's experiments combining ocean recordings with music. Fen joins some of those outings, and Raff is glad to see Alex and his sister become friends as well. When Raff and Alex finally kiss, Raff feels not a rush but a deep, slow, overwhelming steadiness, like the great heart of a whale.

That past is gone. In the present, Alex is absent, Raff cannot bring himself to touch either violin or hydrophone, and he relies only on the punching bag when his emotions become too much. After pacing the beach and fearing he has lost his sister and brother to the Drift because his sister attempted something dangerous without him, Raff cannot reason himself out of his rising fury. He runs up the lighthouse stairs to the old light room and hammers the bag until pain and exhaustion begin to empty him out.

The chapter then explains how Dominic taught him this habit. Dominic, who came from a brutal boxing tradition and once fought professionally before giving it up after meeting Claire, originally refused to let Raff learn because he did not want Raff's childhood shaped by violence. But when Raff's temper began erupting in broken objects and torn pages, Dominic changed his mind and brought him to the bag only in those moments of loss of control. Over time, Raff understood that Dominic had recognized a dangerous force inside him early and had tried to give him a way to contain it.