Vianne, Antoine, and Sophie return to Vianne’s dusty Paris apartment and find no sign of Isabelle. They go to the Hôtel Lutetia, now a reception center for camp returnees, where Vianne registers names with a Red Cross worker and gives M’sieur Montand a list of nineteen hidden Jewish children at Mother Marie-Therese’s orphanage, asking for help reuniting them with surviving family.

After hours of waiting and searching the wall of missing-person notices, the Red Cross worker returns with grim news: Rachel and Marc de Champlain are listed among the dead, and there is still no record of Isabelle Rossignol. On the train home, Vianne and Sophie talk about the war’s damage and the baby Vianne carries, agreeing that love must outlast hatred if they are to have any future.

In the camps, Isabelle endures roll call and selection rumors while coughing blood. Then the guards vanish and American trucks arrive through the gates; Isabelle, barely standing, realizes she has survived to liberation with Micheline.

Weeks later, although the war is ending and camps are being freed, Isabelle still does not come home, and Vianne’s searches turn up nothing. Antoine tries to restore ordinary joy by staging a small backyard performance with Sophie and Daniel, briefly giving Vianne hope that their family can heal.

That fragile peace breaks when OSE representatives Nathaniel Lerner and Phillipe Horowitz arrive to reclaim Daniel—Ari de Champlain—for surviving relatives in Boston. Despite Vianne and Antoine’s pleas to adopt him, the men insist Ari must return to his Jewish family to preserve what remains of their people; Vianne packs his few belongings, tells him the truth about Rachel and Marc, and, amid heartbreaking farewells, leads the crying boy into the car that takes him away.