The narrator asserted that art is defined by context and declared that the original painting, made when the future C. Jat was fourteen, was not technically great. The boy who became C. Jat came from a violent, impoverished harbor town; he drew from the edges inward, began with clouds, and only later added sea and people. His talent was fueled by love, grief, and story, and his friend Joar saw value in him he could not yet see himself.

The chapter argued that wealth and narrative inflate value: once The One of the Sea hung in galleries and the reclusive, broken persona of C. Jat took hold, buyers coveted its story. The painting’s fame grew retroactively as people searched his beginnings; its supposed mystery—children hidden at the pier’s end within expanses of blue—was not intentional. In truth, Joar found the competition; the artist lacked paint and only tried to please his friend.

After a funeral that year, the artist’s hands briefly stopped drawing, and only Joar’s persistence kept him going. On a June evening 25 years earlier, walking home from the pier, Joar told the artist he had to win and escape their town, not because he deserved more than the others but because he could not survive a “normal” hard life like theirs. Joar imagined himself enduring the harbor job and using museum visits to cope for “one more week,” while taking pride in having been part of the artist’s ascent.

The narrative detailed Joar’s volatile, protective nature: he focused intensely, fought only to defend those he loved, and bristled at perceived unfairness. A school incident showed him savagely defending the artist after bullies destroyed a sketchpad; afterward, Joar suffered a severe beating from his alcoholic father and disguised the injuries through reckless play. The artist then hid his drawings more carefully, not for himself or the bullies, but to protect Joar from further violence.

At the crossroads that night Ted called “Tomorrow,” and the boys laughed together, including a fart joke, showing their brief, buoyant camaraderie. The scene then shifted to Joar’s home, where he tended his mother’s plants, cleaned, and tried to shield her from their reality; she repeated that none of it was his responsibility. Despite her attempts at humor and comfort over celebratory pizza, signs of abuse were obvious: her arm was broken and the radiator dented where she had been thrown.

As his mother slept, Joar waited awake for his father’s return, with a knife hidden beneath the lavender and geraniums outside his window. The chapter closed by returning to the thesis—art as context—and foreshadowed that within days the artist would begin the now-famous painting, and that careful viewers might notice flowers painted on the pier beside the teenagers, linking Joar’s homegrown defiance and tenderness to the image.