In the sudden hush after the wind dies, Kyungha sits across from Inseon by candlelight. Inseon reveals she visited the elderly witness's home the year before last, and that the woman died that winter. She corrects one detail from the testimony: her father's hands shook not from emotion but as an aftereffect of torture. He suffered from angina, kept a heated stone pressed to his chest to breathe, and eventually died of a heart attack. Kyungha realizes Inseon has long been collecting testimonies and materials, and wonders if she is preparing a film.

When Kyungha asks, Inseon says her only project these past four years has been the one they shelved together. Kyungha reminds her they had decided to abandon it; she had told Inseon last summer she'd been thinking too simply. Inseon asks what she makes of it now. The dream of rising tide and burial mounds floods back, and Kyungha confesses how nightmares have ravaged her life, that she has no one left. Inseon firmly contradicts her: "You have me."

Kyungha recalls meeting Inseon at twenty-four on a magazine assignment to Wolchulsan, where Inseon cared for her when she fell ill. They discussed legends of women who looked back and turned to stone; Inseon playfully theorized the stone was a shed husk, and the woman dove into water to save someone. Their friendship began that day and persisted through Kyungha's parents' deaths and her isolation.

Kyungha asks whether this house was burned during the massacres. Inseon explains it belonged to her mother's family; her great-grandmother and others fled to a coastal cousin's home before soldiers arrived, and only the stone walls survived. Inseon leads Kyungha into her room with the candle in a paper cup, past shelves of testimony boxes labeled in her own hand—revealing what she has been doing alone for years.

Inseon spreads out a map and tells the story of her mother's family in Hanjinae. Sent down to the coast with rice for relatives, her mother and aunt returned to find their parents massacred in a barley field opposite the school. Their brother was missing; their eight-year-old sister was found in their burned yard, shot in the stomach and jaw. They carried her to the cousin's house, and during the curfew Inseon's mother bit her own finger and let the dying child suck blood from it, briefly believing she might live. This memory haunted her mother until the end.

As Inseon falls silent, faint sounds—sifting sand, rice grains, then feathers and wings and chirrups—rise in the next room. Inseon whispers that they should stay, that the birds aren't there for them. The sounds gradually still into silence.