In a Columbus County classroom, children practice an active shooter drill, hiding in metal “Safety Spaces.” Tasha watches in horror as her daughter Mia and other students giggle and talk in the closet despite being told to stay quiet. Soot, looking at his phone, tries to reassure Tasha by comparing the situation to hurricane drills and citing low statistical odds. Tasha angrily retorts that school shootings are not like weather, and the normalization of such drills is reason enough to leave the country.

When the drill ends, the children emerge from the safety closets. One asks if they lived, and Tasha confirms they did. Soot says goodbye to Mia, who expresses her gratitude that he was there so she could show him how she would survive if the drill were real. Without warning, Soot suddenly breaks down in tears.

At the French medical center, the staff are initially dismissive until the narrator shouts the name of Frenchie, instantly transforming their attitude. The doctors rush Dylan away for treatment. Outside, the narrator sees the black peacock again. A helicopter lands on the hospital roof, and the narrator’s companions, Kelly and The Goon, emerge, announcing they are taking Dylan elsewhere.

The group is flown to Frenchie’s vast Paris mansion, where Dylan is installed in a private wing with a team of doctors. He remains in a coma for months while a routine forms: The narrator, Kelly, and The Goon take turns sitting with him. They become increasingly isolated within the mansion, spending their days separately within the estate, with the narrator often retreating to the three-story library. The narrator and Kelly begin a romantic relationship.

One night, Kelly reveals Dylan’s backstory: He ran away from his parents in America after a family trip to stay in Europe permanently. The narrator imagines the grief of Dylan’s parents. Later, while visiting Dylan with The Goon, they hear a thumping sound. Dylan’s fingers begin twitching as if texting on a phone. Still unconscious, he starts murmuring for his mother, then screaming. He relives a school shooting, begging for his parents and sending what he believes are his final text messages. The narrator shakes him, and Dylan suddenly wakes.

At a college speaking event, Soot tells the story of his daughter Mia’s birth. He describes her mother, Tasha, who had a lifelong problem with a small bladder. During an exceptionally long labor, Mia seemed to delay her own birth to perform repairs on Tasha’s pelvic floor. The delivering doctor, Doctor Dennis, suffered from chronic back pain. When Doctor Dennis finally forced the delivery by instructing Tasha to push, Mia shot out, knocking him off his stool. He fell with a crash, and everyone feared the baby had been crushed. After a terrifying silence, Mia began wailing. The fall miraculously cured both Doctor Dennis’s back problem and Tasha’s bladder issues.

Soot concludes that Mia was “a born fixer” (232) whose need to fix the world ultimately led to her death. He reflects on the cycles of violence in America, the nature of grief, and the lack of a word in English for continuing to live a good life after a loved one has died.

After the speech, during the book signing, fans ask if he really sees “invisible people.” A young Black student approaches and thanks Soot “for being weird” (235). Soot breaks down and cries in front of everyone.

The group celebrates Dylan’s return after his two-and-a-half-month coma. Dylan apologizes repeatedly but claims to remember nothing. For a week, the narrator, Kelly, and The Goon sleep in Dylan’s room, effectively adopting him. They establish new routines within the mansion, gradually abandoning their phones and computers to spend all their time together in the library. They create a self-contained world, isolated from external concerns. The narrator notices the black peacock in the garden is losing its feathers.

After weeks at the estate, they plan a celebration dinner. While preparing, the narrator encounters Frenchie, who arrives with a security guard. Frenchie asks if the narrator is accepting his offer to stay in Europe permanently. The narrator reflects on the peace he has found at the mansion, free from his usual worries about money, crowds, violence, and America. He accepts Frenchie’s offer, agreeing never to return to America. He does not tell the others about his decision yet.

The party proceeds as planned. The group implicitly decides to stay together in the mansion indefinitely. The narrator reflects that this perfect situation is likely why Remus must show up.

In a memory, Soot plays hide-and-seek with his young daughter Mia, using dad jokes to draw out her laughter. After finding her, they sit down to dinner. Soot asks Mia if she ever gets really sad, and she says yes.

The scene shifts surreally. Mia is now 16, wearing the dress she died in. Soot says he does not think he can “save” her, prompting Mia to agree that he cannot change the past. When he says that he isn’t sure how to live with that, she simply states that he has no choice. She explains that he cannot “fix the world,” and that the desire for “people like us” to do so “just swallows us up” (250).When Soot asks what she means by people like us, Mia responds by pointing out that this is why he is writing this story..

In a mansion kitchen, the narrator hears Remus’s whistle and finds him sitting at a table. Remus states he has come to kill the narrator as promised. The narrator remains calm, knowing he has his gun. Remus tells a long story about a college girl from Georgia he knew in Toronto who sang at a bar. On their last night together, she showed him a jackknife she had carried every day since age seven, saying the world was “full of knives or the consequences” (256). Remus began carrying a knife because she understood things about the world that he did not.

Remus tells the narrator to pull his gun. The narrator fumbles and drops it but picks it up and confirms it is loaded. Remus lunges across the table. The gun fires. Remus disarms the narrator and puts an arm around his shoulder. The narrator sees a bullet hole in the glass door behind where Remus was sitting. Dylan is on the other side; he has been shot and falls to the ground.

A distraught Remus whispers that running away was never the answer, as “people like us” simply brought the violence with them (258). He leaves the gun on the table and exits. As Dylan writhes on the floor, Kelly and The Goon rush in. The narrator grabs the gun and flees through Paris. He runs until he reaches a bridge over the Seine. He holds the gun over the water, deciding to let it go. He opens his hand, but the gun does not fall. It floats impossibly in midair, refusing to drop.

The narrator, now framed as an author reflecting on his life outside the main story, details his history of suicidal ideation involving guns. At 14, he took his father’s shotgun to his bedroom and sat with it until he heard his father’s truck returning home. Around age 22 or 24, he bought his first handgun, a Heckler & Koch .45-caliber. In his present, post-award success, that same pistol sits in an expensive Swiss-made nightstand.

He thinks about telling his girlfriend he wants to move everyone they know to Europe to create an “Other Continent” and escape America, but he only imagines the conversation without speaking aloud. He recalls his father’s best friend, his “chosen uncle,” who died by suicide when the narrator was 12. He wonders if his uncle was haunted by visions of America’s future violence and whether his “need to fix the world” destroyed him (267).

The narrator imagines a hypothetical encounter in Paris with a dark-skinned American teenage girl where he overcomes his habit of hiding and reveals his name is Jason Mott. In this imagined scenario, she confides her terror of returning to America and thoughts of suicide tied to fear of school shootings. He imagines weeping with her and recognizing her fear as his own. They share laughter and connection, metaphorically touching the Other Continent. He imagines telling her a story about a family and a gun as a way to help “people like us” who feel too much and want to fix the world (269).