Louisa and Ted sit shivering on seaside rocks at dawn, wrapped in towels after swimming. They joke about the sea’s cold and Louisa’s new sensation of her skin “knowing” the sea. Louisa grieves that Fish never saw the sea; Ted comforts her by saying Fish saw it nightly on their postcard and is seeing it now. Louisa thanks Ted for teaching her to swim; Ted thanks Louisa for getting him back into the sea for the first time in twenty-five years, recalling it was easier to teach her than Ali.

They address their shared guilt over losing the artist’s ashes. Ted takes responsibility, then teases Louisa before both settle into mutual understanding. Louisa asks if the artist would be angry; Ted says the artist would have laughed, liking hide-and-seek. Louisa whimsically suggests ashes scattered on a train so they are always traveling; Ted recoils and says he would prefer a library, describing libraries as places where imaginary friends call to you, quoting Donna Tartt. Louisa is moved.

Louisa notes that Fish loved libraries, then takes out Fish’s cigarettes. Instead of lighting them, she smells one, and Ted asks to borrow one to smell because his mother smoked that brand. They sit with the painting between them, holding unlit cigarettes and feeling the morning breeze.

Louisa asks if Ted is like his mother and if she was kind. Ted laughs and says his mother was hard, with fixed ideas about emotions and masculinity; Joar once joked she could headbutt a diamond. Ted explains his mother discouraged showing feelings and expected him and his brother to be “men.” Louisa objects that this does not sound like Ted; Ted replies that being a mother and a person is difficult, and that his mother began as a romantic whose heart broke.

Louisa asks if his mother hit him; Ted says no, but his older brother did, once throwing him down stairs and knocking him unconscious. He admits he was afraid; they agree it is hard to be little and hard to be everything. When Louisa asks for Ted’s best memory of his mother, he describes playing cards when she pretended he had a fever to keep him home from school after learning he was bullied. For a time they hid from reality together and it felt “wonderful,” but as his father’s illness worsened, Ted had to return to school, where the bullying intensified. He lied about injuries and overheard his mother blaming herself for making him soft and not a “real man.”

Louisa asks when his mother’s heart broke. Ted says it wore out under his father’s illness, poverty, and exhaustion; he recalls being hushed in a house where someone was always sleeping and being given a basement room so he would not be in the way. Louisa gently suggests alternative reasons: to shield him from his father’s illness and his mother’s sadness, and to protect him from his brother. Ted, ashamed he never considered this, absorbs her reframing.

Ted concludes that his parents’ marriage was a love story at first. Louisa brightens, eager for a love story, and Ted begins to tell it as it was once told to him, transitioning toward his parents’ past.