On the rocks at dawn, Louisa challenges Ted for ending his previous story with Joar’s bloody hands at the window. Ted apologizes and resumes, framing violence as contagious rather than inherited, and insisting that to understand the painting they must understand Joar and his mother while saying as little as possible about Joar’s father. Ted reveals that Ali had given Joar a knife the previous winter, fearing an inevitable deadly confrontation, and that Joar hid it first under flowers in a tin box and later in his backpack.

Ted recounts Joar arriving at his basement window with blood-soaked hands and a crushed box, his face badly beaten. Joar described how his father had come into his room after hearing laughter, left to drink, and returned in a drunken rage. Ted and Louisa discuss the dread between beatings; Ted explains how the father’s occasional good days deepened the harm, keeping hope alive and blame misdirected. Joar’s mother maintained appearances with makeup and elegant clothes, while Joar feared becoming like his father and learned to cover bruises and injuries.

Ted explains that the father returned and deliberately crushed the box without even looking inside, seeking only to see Joar broken. What happened next in the room remains partly untold by Ted, but there was a knife in the backpack, a boy on the floor, and a mother trying to restrain the man who would not stop hitting. Joar then came to Ted’s window, asked Ted to hide the box, refused to come inside, and ran home after Ted blurted, “I love you.”

Ted details what followed at Joar’s apartment: the father passed out on the sofa while Joar found his mother on her knees scrubbing the floor. Earlier, Joar and his mother had wrapped two perfumed soaps (a gift from Ali) in a sock and placed them in the twig-lined box as a decoy. When the father smashed the box, he mistook the soaps for the bird; afterward Joar retrieved the real bird from the window box, cutting his hands on the tin edges and staining the bird and box with blood, then carried it to Ted. Joar and his mother later scrubbed the room together, sharing a small victory in having saved a life.

The next morning, Joar woke to the smell of burnt muffins his mother had tried to bake, while the father was hauled to work still drunk. Days later, at the end of July, five people—Ted, Joar, Ali, the artist, and Joar’s mother—went to the pier to release the healed bird. Joar’s mother dressed up and proudly joined, bantering with the teenagers. Emotions ran high as the bird rested in the artist’s hands, then suddenly lifted its head and took flight.

The group rejoiced as the bird circled above the sea, then laughed when it turned back toward town. Joar’s mother suggested it returned to its friends, as Joar would have. Ali urged everyone to go swimming, and they all jumped off the pier together. Back in the present, Ted carefully packs his towel beside the painting’s box and tells Louisa that was the last time he swam in the sea with his friends.