The narrator receives the exorbitant payment she demanded for Platon's death, which is officially declared an accident. Abandoning her plan to go to Malta, she buys an E-Class Mercedes and drives to Spain, passing through Palafrugell, Platon's birthplace, before settling in a tiny coastal village where she becomes the lone guest of an off-season hotel. She befriends a sloe-eyed Catalonian clerk who agrees to warn her if anyone comes asking about her.

She establishes a quiet routine: morning swims in the salt-rich cove with a resident cormorant, afternoons on the terrace. She gives up alcohol entirely. Reading the news, she learns the protest at Vantôme became a full-scale melee with 258 arrests. The state is pursuing Pascal Balmy, Jérôme, and Alexandre, and police raided Le Moulin, seizing the entire library. Jean is under investigation, Bruno is named as a "bizarre survivalist" mentor, and Bruno has changed his email password, locking her out. Michel Thomas was injured but gained notoriety. Nancy's FBI documents about the narrator have been leaked online.

The narrator bans the internet as another crippling attachment. She walks the cliffs, visits a lighthouse, and reflects on a myth about a battleship mistaking a lighthouse for a small boat. When the hotel closes for winter, she rents a small house on a bluff, where she sleeps with only a delivered bed.

On her veranda she follows Bruno's star instructions, locating the Big Dipper and Polaris, recalling his teachings about Polynesian etak navigation, Cartesian coordinates, GPS, and humanity's disconnection from the cosmos. She feels merged with Bruno across distance, but then notices satellites crawling across the sky like "electric lice," which she finds offensive. She reflects she never met Bruno in person, wondering if the man at the lake had been him.

Lying in the dark, she hallucinates Les Babies, the figures from the Dubois house, drifting through her mind. She bids them goodbye as the only children she will ever have. As autumn deepens, the Big Dipper sinks toward the horizon. She lives quietly, occasionally visited by her Catalonian friend. In December, a new work inquiry arrives from the UK; she declines, claiming she has retired to Priest Valley.