Left alone in the house with Dominic, Rowan feels trapped by his silence and by the loss of momentum that brought her to Shearwater. To steady herself, she strips the paint from the dining table and begins restoring the wood beneath it. The physical work calms her because it reconnects her to a former sense of home, but once the task is paused for the oil to dry, Rowan is left restless again.

Rowan finds Orly in the study doing summer homework and persuades him to take a break. He leads her inland to a lookout where they quietly watch Ari, a nesting wandering albatross, and Orly explains the bird’s breeding cycle and Fen’s earlier project tracking Ari and Nikau’s chick. While Rowan braids Orly’s hair, the moment gives her rare peace and deepens her affection for him and for the strange life the family has built on the island.

That evening Rowan and Orly go down to the beach, where Raff and Fen have lit a driftwood fire. Rowan checks on Fen after the discovery of Yen’s body, and their conversation turns from Fen’s isolated upbringing to Rowan’s bleak views on love, parenthood, and attachment to place. Rowan warns Fen that loving people or landscapes only leads to devastation, while Fen pushes back, revealing her own uncertainty about Dominic: she knows he loves her but is not sure he truly sees her.

After Rowan walks the boys back to the lighthouse, Dominic appears in her dark bedroom and abruptly shifts from hostility to guarded candor. He reveals that he found Rowan’s photograph and now knows Hank is her husband. Dominic claims Hank completed the seed-sorting work, left instructions behind, and departed with the others, which raises the painful possibility that Hank chose not to contact Rowan rather than simply being prevented from doing so.

The chapter then shifts into Rowan’s memory of the period after the fire that destroyed the landscape she loved and left her emotionally shattered. Living with her pregnant sister Liv, Rowan received increasingly erratic emails from Hank as he became consumed by the shutdown of Shearwater’s seed vault and by the forced decision over which species would be preserved. When Hank finally sent three alarming messages saying he was unsafe and in danger, Rowan ignored caution and decided to go to Shearwater herself, because his plea gave her a purpose she had lost.