After dinner, Fen quickly puts on her cold-weather gear and returns to the boathouse despite Raff asking her to stay. Dominic does not try to stop Fen beyond telling her to go straight there, and then he also withdraws, leaving Rowan with Raff and Orly. While the boys do schoolwork, Rowan watches Orly patiently help Raff read with an L-shaped card and notes both Raff’s frustration and the tenderness between the brothers.

Alone with her thoughts, Rowan stretches her sore body after the recent hike and thinks about parents, children, and the lives adults choose for them. Seeing Dominic’s family and Fen’s distance makes Rowan remember her own childhood on a houseboat, which she once romanticized as adventurous but now understands as a precarious struggle. Rowan admits to herself that although she is grateful to her mother for trying, she has long carried anger over the neglect that led to the later accident, and that trauma kept her off boats until she boarded Yen’s.

Restless, Rowan climbs to the top of the lighthouse and discovers the great Fresnel lens, which amazes her with its scale and design. There she also finds Dominic, sweaty and bloodied from using a punching bag. Dominic explains how the lens works and speaks with genuine excitement about the ingenuity of lighthouse technology, and Rowan responds to both his knowledge and the pleasure he takes in sharing it.

Together they look out over Shearwater from above, where the island’s vulnerability to the sea is starkly visible. Dominic talks about old lighthouse keepers, the hard labor of tending a flame through every night, and the trust sailors placed in them. On the balcony, he reveals that in the early years on the island he imagined Claire at sea and dreamed that, if he could keep a light burning, he might guide her home; the confession exposes how deeply he is still shaped by her absence.

Back inside, Rowan notices the contrast between the beautiful lens and the punching bag, and Dominic admits the bag helps Raff manage his temper. Rowan challenges Dominic’s approach, suggesting that instead of making Raff as hard as his anger, he should help Raff become softer than it. Dominic is hurt and retreats from the subject, returning to the mechanics of the lamp, while Rowan realizes that her curiosity is shifting away from the lighthouse itself and toward Dominic’s inner life.