Just before Easter, Louisa infiltrated a high-end church auction to see The One of the Sea by C. Jat, the painting she had carried as a postcard through years in foster care. After taunting a wealthy couple and insisting it was not a painting of the sea, she defied expectations by drawing a tiny red fish on the wall instead of vandalizing the canvas. A guard grabbed her, triggering panic: she stabbed him with a red pen, doused him in white spray paint, bit his ear, and was hurled out. Fleeing through streets, she held to what the painting truly showed—three teenagers laughing at the end of a pier—and doubled back behind the church, where she collided with a small, ill man and his ginger cat. The man hid her from the chase, shared cigarettes and jokes, and invited her to paint the back wall; Louisa covered it with hearts, fish, cockroaches, and jellyfish guards while the man added a row of skulls. Sirens closed in, and Louisa realized the man was the artist himself. C. Jat pressed a spray can into her hand, made her promise not to hurt herself, and urged her to run. He was tackled and injured as police arrived, and a well-dressed man, Ted, rushed from the auction, recognized the skulls, and cradled the bleeding artist, who begged, “Don’t let them catch her, Ted!”

That night in the hospital, Ted kept vigil as the dying artist joked gently, asked about Louisa, and confessed he had slipped to the alley trying to see his first painting one last time. Ted had secretly repurchased the masterpiece at ruinous cost; he hung it on the hospital wall in place of the exit map so Kimkim—C. Jat’s private name among friends—could look at their youth. They remembered summers on a pier with Joar and Ali, skulls by a signature, and the laughter that made them feel alive. The artist asked Ted to find Louisa and give her “it,” then died in Ted’s arms. On her birthday, Louisa woke in a stranger’s car to a radio announcing his death, drifted in grief, and returned to the alley to paint through the night. Ted arrived, catching a thrown can with his face, and delivered two boxes: a small one of ashes and a large one with the painting, explaining Kimkim had sold everything to buy it back for her. Panicked at the burden, homeless and undocumented for a gift without papers, Louisa chased Ted to the station and argued to come with him. He resisted until a ticket inspector grabbed Louisa’s bruised wrist; Ted stepped between them, bought her a ticket, and the two boarded a train with the painting and ashes.

As the journey unspooled—delays, jokes, and aching silences—Ted told Louisa the truth of the painting. Twenty-five years earlier, three boys and a girl were bound by a violent town and an unbreakable loyalty. Christian, a young janitor, had given the fearful fourteen-year-old the first refuge to paint dragons, angels, winged men, and skulls; days later Christian died, the school painted over their mural, and Joar found a youth competition that became a lifeline. The quartet spent a summer running to the pier, stealing moments of joy between funerals and bruises. They framed the canvas with driftwood and, when they learned the competition was for under-thirteens, broke into a museum at night to hang it anyway. A security guard insisted on an adult, and Christian’s mother came, affirmed the work, and carried it from the hall as if it were alive. She gathered Kimkim’s drawings, found him a place at art school, and helped his parents support him. Ali moved away and later drowned surfing after turning eighteen; Kimkim buried his parents and left to paint the world, saying he painted the way they laughed. In the present, Ted and Louisa were jolted apart when Louisa slipped off a stalled train, two men assaulted Ted, and Louisa returned swinging a pipe to save him. They fled by tracks and taxi, crying and bickering, and chased the train that held the painting, ashes, and Ted’s suitcase, only to watch it thunder past.

A mother from the earlier train found them with Ted’s suitcase and the boxed painting, but the small box of ashes had been discarded. On a bleak coast before dawn, Ted chose not to chase the ashes; instead, he and Louisa paid for borrowed swimsuits with a note and went to the sea. Ted taught Louisa to swim at last, and on the rocks afterward they shared unlit cigarettes for their dead, reframed childhood hurts, and began the last leg home. In Ted’s transformed hometown, they visited Kimkim’s grave and walked to a run-down house, where Joar opened the door. Over coffee, Louisa discovered Kimkim’s real name among friends, Joar’s ankle monitor and prison time for defending a woman, and the ramp from years caring for his brain-injured father after a harbor accident ended the violence in the home. From the rooftop, Joar told his part: perfumed soaps in a decoy box, a mother who would have killed to protect her child, harbor men who finally faced their complicity, and a bird nursed to health and released at the pier on the last day they all swam together.

Ted rejoined them with Christian’s mother, who consoled Louisa with her “peekaboo” way of living with grief and offered to help. Together they finished the museum story and what came after: Christian’s mother found hundreds of drawings in Ted’s basement and ushered Kimkim into the world; the friends hid rocks with their names at a crossroads and dreamed of reuniting. Years later, Kimkim phoned from faraway walls; Joar slid toward alcohol and prison and kept being the sort of man who steps between fists and the vulnerable; Ted became a caretaker and then a teacher again. One night, Louisa, Ted, and Christian’s mother drove to the museum, squeezed through a bathroom window, and hung the painting. Louisa refused to sell it, fearing it would turn art into money in her mind; they sat on the floor, speaking of fear, mercy, and learning how to be human. The reverse heist became global news, the auctioneer “lost” the records to protect them, and the painting stayed on the hometown wall.

In the days that followed, a chain of conductors returned Kimkim’s ashes; at the funeral the minister read scripture, Christian’s mother read poems, Louisa painted wings on the stone, and Joar attended on a monitored exception. Louisa drew skulls and cockroaches from church to sea, found her place in art school through Christian’s mother’s connections and Ted’s help, and traveled to paint her own postcards for others. Ted settled near the pier, resumed teaching, visited the museum hand in hand with Joar, and traded silence and books with Christian’s mother. Years later, Louisa called from another city, breathless after finding a teenager painting a wall—“one of us.” She told Ted it was his turn to write, and as a new chapter began, they agreed to keep choosing each other, to carry forward laughter, and to leave their art in other people.