Kyungha continues going through Jeongsim's archive of clippings by candlelight. The papers track decades of bereaved-family activism around the Gyeongsan cobalt mine: 1995 memorial rites, 1998 joint ceremonies, 1999 editorials demanding exhumation, the 2000 reassembly of victims' families, and the 2001 survey expedition that, after dynamiting the sealed shaft, uncovered a flood of skeletal remains. Inseon hands Kyungha a thousand-page volume documenting the 2007-2009 nationwide exhumations, with photographs of sorted bones and personal effects. Roughly 400 sets of remains were recovered while over 3,000 remain in the mine.

Inseon reveals that her mother Jeongsim never recovered her brother's bones. Kyungha, overwhelmed and shivering, recognizes why Inseon avoided making a film: the sensory horrors would inevitably be sanitized, much as Kyungha herself omitted atrocities from her earlier book.

Inseon recounts meeting the president of the Jeju bereaved families' association, who described Jeongsim as the association's most dedicated member. On the day exhumation was halted, the group entered the mine together. Afterward, the Gyeongsan secretary recounted a rumor: a baby-faced young man in bloodstained clothes had survived the massacre, asking a household for clean clothes before fleeing into the night. Hearing this, Jeongsim vomited until only stomach acid remained.

Inseon admits the survivor could possibly have been her uncle, splitting her mother's grief in two: her brother as one of thousands of corpses, and as a vanished young man. Kyungha asks how Inseon's father survived; Inseon answers without flinching that this was exactly why Jeongsim sought him out.

Inseon narrates her parents' courtship. Jeongsim, having heard rumors of a man returned from a fifteen-year Daegu sentence, approached him on a Hanjinae street, invoking her brother's name. He resisted but eventually met her in a town tea room. He explained he had been transferred to Busan in spring 1950 because Daegu Penitentiary was overcrowded—long-sentence Jeju inmates were moved, which inadvertently saved him. He witnessed Bodo League members herded into Busan, then trucked away in September; the Incheon landing halted further killings. He had heard of Inseon's uncle through another inmate but had never met him in prison. Jeongsim later relayed to Inseon her father's torture at the alcohol factory—being stripped, hung upside down, waterboarded, and electrocuted while denying knowledge of leftist contacts. Afterward, Jeongsim would inexplicably berate herself for once having commented on his hair, then withdraw from her daughter's touch.