Ted accidentally fell asleep on the train and woke to Louisa tapping impatiently; she needed a bathroom and was surprised trains had toilets. After she left, Ted reflected on aging and a painful memory of joking about the artist’s mortality, which had left him ashamed even as the artist laughed.

Alone with the ashes, Ted addressed the box, saying he understood what the artist saw in Louisa. Louisa returned and asked if he had been crying; a comic exchange about his hairline followed, then a tangent about train toilets and crude hypotheticals that tested Ted’s patience. Ted asked for silence, which Louisa attempted while sketching, feet propped up, prompting Ted to correct her posture and later stop her from pretending to smoke.

Their back-and-forth revealed mutual grief and defensiveness. Louisa asked about Ted’s family life and called it a “waste” that he was not an annoying dad, then shifted to the painting, timidly asking about the flowers beside the boys on the pier. Ted gently named them as geraniums and lavender and began to talk about Joar.

Louisa’s excitement at remembering Joar’s famous farting broke the tension, and both laughed. Ted described Joar’s mother as a gifted grower whose flowers made a home smell lovely despite the violence of Joar’s father, who beat Joar and his mother. Realizing Louisa already knew such cruelty, Ted apologized; Louisa said she understood and thanked him for sharing and for letting her come.

Ted added that Joar was actually the shortest of them, though he appeared tallest in the painting. Louisa joked about hobbits, then suggested Joar looked big because that was how Ted saw him, comparing it to her friend Fish, who felt big to her despite being shorter. She reframed “feeling small” as not always bad, if someone makes you feel safely small.

Looking at the ashes, Ted conceded to himself that the artist had been right about Louisa: she was one of them, bound by shared loss, resilience, and the need to belong.