Nell works through a practical, exhausting task: hauling and packing cargo bags around the station’s cramped modules. Anything burnable or not meant to return to Earth—food waste, used toiletries, sweat-soaked clothing, and cuttings—is stowed to be loaded onto a resupply craft arriving next week; after it undocks later, the refuse will burn up in the atmosphere, with any surviving fragments becoming long-lived orbital debris.

As Nell moves through the station’s hatch-and-tube maze, microgravity makes her feel as if she is freediving: slow, suspended, and calmly carried. The station’s tight interior can flip instantly into the opposite feeling when she looks out—a rush from claustrophobia to agoraphobia. Passing Anton in a doorway, the two rotate sideways to glide past each other, briefly brushing in the confined space.

The physical shunting of packed cubes triggers a childhood memory of a caravan holiday shortly before Nell’s mother died. She remembers her mother methodically squeezing bags into peeling cupboards and tight compartments as if they were moving in, and Nell wonders whether they might have lived in a caravan during a later period her father called “between homes,” though he never mentioned it.

Looking out, Nell watches the planet shift beneath them: northern Europe’s brown cloud complexity, the south coast of Ireland and England, then greener terrains and seas as they move south. Africa appears in abstracted bands of color, and the Nile stands out like royal-blue ink. Nell recalls her husband describing Africa from space as painterly and saying he would weep at Earth’s beauty, yet also admitting he needs firm ground and simplicity and could not live as she does.

Nell thinks about their relationship’s distance and how they try to bridge it by exchanging photos almost daily: his images of Irish land and weather, hers of Earth, the station, and crew life. He jokes about the difficulty of having a wife racing overhead, but Nell recognizes the irony: her orbit is mapped and her location is knowable, while his life in Ireland—where he has moved largely alone—feels more mysterious to her. When Nell asks who is more unknown, he answers that they are both equally unknown in different ways.