The narrator describes the email correspondence between Bruno Lacombe and Le Moulin, noting that Bruno receives messages from only one shared account, with Pascal Balmy presumably the main correspondent, though queries are unsigned. The questions are short and open-ended, while Bruno's replies are lengthy and discursive.

She recounts a recent exchange in which the Le Moulin correspondent followed up on Bruno's earlier discussion of Neanderthal depression and smoking by questioning how tobacco, which they consider invasive in their rewilding project, could be native to France rather than a New World plant. Bruno responds by critiquing the questioner's conditioning and challenging conventional notions of "native" and "new."

Bruno argues tobacco is not exclusively a New World plant and that human migration was never a tidy three-act movement out of Africa, into Europe, and across a land bridge. Instead, he describes settlement as diffuse and multidirectional, with people exercising "free" will, his scare quotes signaling skepticism.

The narrator digresses on scare quotes, observing that both the highly educated and the barely literate overuse quotation marks for opposite reasons. She recalls her former life as a Berkeley graduate student in rhetoric, where she despised pretentious women who air-quoted to perform critique. She abandoned that academic path, sparing herself their fate, and fantasizes about a blade slicing off their gesturing fingers.