During a stretch of hot weather, the Moulinards take daily group swims at the river. The narrator joins one such outing, hoping to forge connections with members she usually doesn't interact with, particularly Aurélie, a tough, long-haired woman who runs the group's market stall and is, according to Nadia, one of the people most opposed to her.

At the swimming hole—the same spot where Pascal once told her about the boy who impregnated his teacher—Moulinards take turns leaping from a limestone shelf into deep, muddy water. René, Pascal, Jérôme, Alexandre and others jump; the narrator observes the group's family structure, including René's two small children with a woman in the crèche. Aurélie taunts the narrator, demanding that the American jump too. The narrator chooses to keep her T-shirt and shorts on, conscious that her body would draw disapproval from the women.

Reluctant about irreversible decisions, the narrator forces herself to leap. She lands stiffly, her foot grazing a log on the bottom, and emerges shaken. Sitting near Aurélie, she pretends not to understand her French, but Aurélie pierces her cover, telling her plainly that her emotions show and that the group sees through her attempts to hide. Aurélie laughingly compares the narrator's terrified expression to descriptions of skiers killed when an American jet sliced a tram cable in the Alps, framing Americans as wreckers of everything.

Burdmoore then climbs far higher than the others to a fifty-foot precipice and executes a perfect swan dive, emerging with his belly seemingly his source of power. The narrator is awed, but Aurélie shrugs and says he does it every time and they are all bored by it—deflating the narrator's attempt to bond through shared admiration.