Kyungha flies to Jeju at Inseon's urgent request to save her surviving budgie, Ama, who will die without water within a day. Inseon insists Kyungha go immediately rather than wait until morning, refuses to let the bird be relocated to Seoul, and claims there's no one else on the island she can ask. Bewildered but unable to refuse, Kyungha goes straight from the hospital to Gimpo Airport without packing.

Her plane lands shakily at Jeju amid wind shear and a fierce blizzard. Unable to get a taxi to Inseon's remote uplands village, she follows a porter's advice to take buses, boarding an express bus to the southern coastal town of P— to transfer to a local bus. The storm intensifies as she travels, palm trees thrashing, snow swirling violently, and a migraine threatens. A stranded tourist boards, arguing futilely with the driver about reaching the airport.

Watching the storm, Kyungha recalls how she learned Inseon was from Jeju, then a long-ago snowy night when Inseon told her about running away from home at seventeen. Inseon had come to despise her gentle, stooped, nightmare-plagued mother, stole money, fled to Seoul, found a restaurant job, then fell five meters from an icy embankment and lay unconscious for days. Her mother had dreamed of snow refusing to melt on her child's face and knew she was hurt.

Beside Inseon's hospital bed, the mother revealed for the first time the family secret: as a girl, soldiers and police had massacred everyone in her village. She and her seventeen-year-old sister had searched the elementary school grounds, wiping frozen snow from corpses' faces to identify their family. Every snowfall brought the memory back. Inseon's hatred for her mother dissolved that night, replaced by confusion, and she soon began making documentary films.

The bus reaches P—. Kyungha realizes she must buy a lantern, rubber boots, and a shovel to reach Inseon's house through the snowed-under upland roads. She steps off into an eerily still town, the wind momentarily fallen, heavy snowflakes drifting onto wet black asphalt and vanishing.