Sadie reads Bruno's latest email to the Moulinards, sent into silence since they have stopped responding. Bruno discusses a new theory that the cave paintings at Lascaux, Chauvet, and elsewhere may not depict hunted animals but star maps, and that the famous red handprints in caves might represent the Milky Way. He instructs his readers to go outside and locate Polaris, the North Star, by tracing a line from the Big Dipper.

Sadie obeys. She walks outside the Dubois house, lies on the ground under a moonless, star-filled sky, finds the Big Dipper, and locates Polaris, feeling proud and silently telling Bruno she found it. She returns inside to continue reading.

Bruno relates the story of Tupaia, an eighteenth-century Polynesian high priest who sailed with Captain Cook and could speak with the Māori half an ocean away, demonstrating that Polynesians were the world's most advanced seafarers long before Europeans. Tupaia drew Cook a map that Europeans misread for two hundred years because they imposed cardinal directions on a different system of knowledge. Polynesians navigated using star paths, smells, cloud shapes, wave patterns felt through their bodies, and training that began in infancy in tent-structures modeled on the cosmos.

Bruno reframes his own thinking. He suggests Homo sapiens and Neanderthals alike were trying to imagine their futures by mapping the heavens. He admits that his belief in "Better Before" may have been a myth, a reverse teleology, and that he has lost his bearings. He has forsaken the sky and the future in his obsession with the past, and must find new bearings. He signs off.

Alone in the Dubois house, Sadie lies on her bed watching wind move trees and stars. She speaks Bruno's name aloud, telling him she feels the same way. The act of speaking unlocks something; she finds herself crying, observing herself from above as a girl on a bed in a house she will soon leave, weeping in a false life.