A month after moving in with Lucien in Paris, the narrator ("Sadie") accompanies him by TGV to Marseille, where he is shooting a film based on a pulp novel about the city's criminal underworld. The trip serves her cover: spending the contracted week of romance in exchange for access to Lucien's family estate, after which she will rent a car and drive to the Guyenne to ingratiate herself with Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards.

On the train, seated facing backward, Lucien grows nauseated and pale. Feigning concern, Sadie offers to fetch him sparkling water and goes to the café car.

There, she reveals that her assignment extends beyond Balmy and the Moulinards: her handlers have also tasked her with tracking a French deputy minister, an obscure bureaucrat whose habits in Paris and elsewhere she has been studying. She reads an incoming message about him, sends a brief reply, drinks a glass of white wine, buys Lucien water and mints, and returns to her seat.

Lucien rests his head in her lap. Sadie reflects on backward travel as classical, like rowing a boat into the future while watching the past recede. A train passes in the opposite direction, and the rush of air briefly unsettles her, though she reassures herself the trains run on separate tracks.