Louisa remains unnoticed at first, moving invisibly among wealthy guests in the church-turned-auction. An old woman disparages “new money,” while her husband, Charles, eyes the sandwiches and the headline piece, The One of the Sea by C. Jat. Louisa slips under the rope toward the painting, overwhelmed by feelings she cannot name, anchored by the postcard in her backpack: “Miss you, see you soon. —Mom.”

The old woman confronts Louisa for approaching the artwork. Louisa, emotional, breaks the plan and insists, “It isn’t a painting of the sea,” mocking the woman as a vulgar social climber. Charles demands her supervisor and then her parents, and Louisa quietly replies she does not work there. When the woman spots the backpack and assumes she is an activist with spray paint, Louisa instead takes out a thin red pen and draws a tiny fish on the wall next to the painting, wanting to leave a mark for herself and Fish.

The woman screams and Charles goes to fetch a guard. Louisa reflects bitterly that adults assume she has parents and that, had she wanted to destroy the painting, she could have destroyed everything—everyone she loves dies. The guard, a large man with a small furious head, approaches as Louisa clutches the red pen.

A rush of backstory follows. Louisa’s father was absent; her mother may have once wanted to be a mother but disappeared when Louisa was five, leaving her with neighbors and never returning. Louisa grew up moving between foster homes, speaking only her mother’s language, then falling silent after mockery and violence. In one home, a refrigerator covered in art postcards became her refuge; she stole one of The One of the Sea, the first beautiful thing she took.

Louisa later met Fish in a foster home; they bonded instantly, shared nightly closeness and break-in skills, and Fish helped her learn languages and movie English. Police eventually informed Louisa that her mother was deceased from substance abuse; Fish explained the bureaucratic words to her. Louisa’s child-mind transformed this into a fear of swimming and a confusion of memories, discovering a lullaby she “remembered” was actually from an old film.

Determined to claim her own memory, Louisa wrote “See you soon. —Mom” on the back of the postcard, keeping the imagined love. She vowed that she and Fish would one day see the painting and that reaching the sea might cure her fear. Now, standing before the painting, she feels the tidal-wave magnitude others ascribe to parenthood, and her impulsive red fish becomes a declaration that she and Fish were here.

As the guard closes in and panic rises around the couple, the narration states that despite her hopes, there will be no fairy-tale ending. Yet it marks this charged, rule-breaking moment as the beginning of Louisa’s adventure.