The morning after speaking with Marisol, Evangeline slips out at daybreak because she has found a note signed by Luc asking her to meet him at her father’s curiosity shop. The note revives Evangeline’s hope that Luc might explain himself differently from Marisol’s account, and she returns emotionally to Maximilian’s Curiosities, the last beloved remnant of her parents.

When Evangeline reaches the shop, she finds it boarded up, renamed under new ownership, and closed. A patroller stops her from pounding on the door, then recognizes her from the scandal sheets as Valenda’s Sweetheart Savior. He shows her an article that romanticizes her sacrifice, quotes her out of context, and announces that Agnes Tourmaline is accepting applications from suitors for Evangeline’s hand in marriage.

Evangeline realizes Luc’s note must be old because he would not have chosen the shuttered shop as a meeting place. Grief overtakes her: the loss of the shop hurts because it represents her father and mother more deeply than even the pain of losing Luc. When Evangeline returns to Agnes’s house, she finds a line of well-dressed men submitting marriage applications while Agnes cheerfully receives them.

Instead of retreating, Evangeline publicly frightens the suitors away by claiming that she remains cursed and that anyone she kisses will turn to stone. Agnes drops her pleasant façade, grabs Evangeline, and reveals the suitor scheme was meant to help Marisol regain attention as much as to marry off Evangeline. Evangeline confronts Agnes about selling her father’s shop, but Agnes argues Evangeline was presumed dead.

Agnes then wounds Evangeline further by showing her a farewell letter from Luc to Marisol. In the letter, Luc calls Marisol his treasure and says he is leaving Valenda to find a healer so he can return as the man Marisol loved. Evangeline recognizes Luc’s handwriting and, though she accuses Agnes of doing something to him, Agnes tells Evangeline to believe what she can see.

Still needing confirmation, Evangeline goes to Luc Navarro’s family home. Unlike earlier visits, when servants turned her away, no one answers; the house is silent, curtained, and covered as if abandoned. Faced with Luc’s departure and his letter to Marisol, Evangeline remembers Jacks’s warning that if Luc loved her, he would not be marrying someone else.