Having stopped taking his sedatives, Lee notices his father is acting strangely. His father is constantly tense, lies about small things, obsessively takes out the trash, and wears a broken watch. Lee keeps the discovery about his closet and the ghost girl, Sen, a secret to avoid stressing his father’s weak heart. Confident that his prophecy about the fire will make her reappear, Lee waits for his father to leave the house, then picks the lock on his forbidden study.

Inside, Lee finds newspaper clippings about a human trafficking ring in Asia. The articles link the ring to organ harvesting and a distinct turtle tattoo found on victims. Lee realizes his father is searching for his mother, who disappeared years ago, and expects to find her dead and dismembered. The discovery triggers a memory from when Lee was nine: His mother tried to run away with him in the middle of the night, disguising it as an “Egyptian mummy” game, but they were stopped by his father and the police.

Itaro returns late from the woods, covered in what he claims is fox blood, though Sen is skeptical of this. The sky is clear, and she dismisses the foreigner’s prophecy of a fire. At dinner, her mother complains about the lack of food, enraging Itaro. He verbally abuses her and then, as a test of Sen’s loyalty, orders her to cut off her mother’s fingers with a dagger. To win his approval, Sen obeys, though she proposes to sever only two fingers so that her mother can still hold the baby. Itaro agrees to this.

Afterward, a servant named Youna cleans the blood from Sen’s hands and offers a cryptic warning that her father “lives alone” in a “house has no doors,” (126) implying he is emotionally unreachable. While Sen waits on the porch for Itaro to return from another outing, she sees a hare run beneath the house. She then looks toward the horizon and sees a column of black smoke rising from the direction of town, confirming the foreigner’s prediction was true.

A flashback details Lee’s trip the previous summer to the Cambodian hotel where his mother vanished. He attempted to recreate the night of her disappearance, leaving the sliding door open with an empty suitcase on the patio. He hoped to summon whatever took her, but in the morning, he only found a dead sea turtle inside the suitcase. The experience makes him realize that will and location are not enough to contact the dead.

In the present day, Lee finds Hina sitting on the beach. She speaks ominously about the dangers of the low tide and suggests his mother may have drowned. Lee angrily denies this possibility. That night in his room, the closet door begins to glow, and Sen appears on the other side, holding a sword.

Sen immediately confronts Lee with her sword, accusing him of causing the fire in town. He denies it, and she is convinced enough by his sincerity to enter his room to investigate. She finds that his room is an older, worn version of her own, confirmed by identical markings like hook holes and a dent in the doorframe. As a final test, she checks under the loose floorboard and finds the sword guard she had hidden, now ancient and tarnished. Convinced, she accepts that she is a ghost in Lee’s time.

Lee proposes they exchange information: He will tell her about the future if she tells him about her past. Sen asks when the soldiers will come for her family. To find out, Lee says he needs her name and suggests they go to the town archives. As they talk, Jim appears. Lee quickly lies that Sen is a local girl he met. To ensure they both remember the encounter is real, they exchange artifacts from each other’s times: Lee gives Sen a fork and she offers him the broken pieces of the ancient sword guard in return.

Lee has a disturbing memory of murdering his roommate, James Baldridge, and grimly congratulates himself on having hidden the body so well. Later, he has a tense conversation with his father, who expresses a fetishistic approval of Lee’s interest in Sen because she is Japanese and because it means he likes girls. The ensuing discussion agitates Jim’s weak heart, leaving Lee feeling both angry and guilty.

While waiting for Sen to reappear, Lee creates a spreadsheet to track the variables that might control the portal between their worlds. When Sen finally arrives, he brings her to the kitchen, where she is unnerved by a strange stain on the wall, creating a charged moment of shared understanding between them. Hina enters and is uncharacteristically cold toward Sen, insisting she leave her katana behind because carrying swords in public is now illegal. The news shatters Sen, as it proves that the samurai rebellion she was training for in the past eventually failed. Lee attempts to comfort her, and they leave for the town hall under Hina’s disapproving watch.

A flashback reveals that when Sen was a child, her mother attempted to sacrifice her to a sea god to cure her ill brother. Sen was rescued from the water by a female figure who emerged from the dark sea and claimed, “This lonely child is mine,” (160) and has felt she is living on borrowed time ever since.

In the present, Sen walks with Lee to town. When he grabs her arm to prevent a fall, their physical contact transforms the world around them into a gray, sandy wasteland where a giant tsunami looms on the horizon. The vision disappears when they let go.

At the town hall, they use Sen’s 19th-century wooden passport as identification. After Lee lies about its origin and Sen feigns tears to elicit sympathy, an archivist provides a copy of her family’s official register. The document reveals that her entire family will be killed in three days. Devastated, Sen runs home to warn her father, but he is preparing to hunt down a spy. When she begs him to flee, he becomes enraged, violently attacking her and threatening her with his sword for showing fear before storming out.

Lee discovers that a lock of Sen’s hair, which he secretly cut as she left the town archive, turns to ash whenever he steps off the house’s property line. It reverts to hair upon his return. Having learned Sen’s real surname is Iwasaki, he researches her family’s fate and discovers the horrific truth of their deaths, which he decides to hide from her. That night, he receives a text from his dead roommate, James Baldridge, which causes him to panic.

After fleeing his room, Lee returns to find it flooding with blood pouring from the closet. Inside, a samurai in full armor appears and dies by ritual suicide. Terrified, Lee scrambles through the portal into Sen’s time and runs into the forest, where Sen finds him. She hides him under the porch of the house just as Itaro arrives, dragging a captured spy. From his hiding place, Lee watches as Sen’s father orders her to execute the man. After a moment of hesitation, she whispers “Forgive me” in English, then kills the spy. The man’s blood pours through the floorboards, drenching Lee below.

This chapter recounts the second part of the Urashima Tarō legend, a traditional Japanese folktale. The fisherman Urashima Tarō is brought to an underwater palace by a turtle he saved. The turtle transforms into the beautiful princess Otohime. After spending three days in the magical palace where all seasons exist at once, the fisherman becomes homesick for his elderly mother. The princess permits him to leave, but gives him a small box with a strict warning never to open it.