Joseph approaches the outbuilding, realizing that Ettie, not Tartuffe, has been the center of the farmhouse’s mysteries. He enters and discovers her with two identical paintings of a lobster on a silver platter. He recalls seeing her burn another painting, Young Man with Orange, and understands she must have painted a copy. Ettie confesses to forging Tartuffe’s work, explaining that she does it to prove her artistic talent is equal to his. Unable to tell the original from the copy, Joseph listens as she reveals that all of the Tartuffe paintings sold over the past three years are her copies and that she destroyed the originals to hide her deception.

She explains her complex motivations: revenge against Tartuffe and Raimondi for dismissing her capability as an artist, and the knowledge that this is the only way for her art to be valued by a world that would ignore it under her own name. When Joseph asks which lobster painting is real, Ettie challenges him to choose which one to burn. He guesses randomly, and she sets one of the canvases on fire. After returning the surviving painting to the studio, she kisses Joseph. The next day, Joseph is wracked with turmoil. Revealing the truth would make his journalism career but betray Ettie. He decides to protect her and mails his now-deceptive article to his editor, Harry.

A detailed account of Ettie’s daily routine reveals a life of relentless, thankless servitude to Tartuffe. From dawn until late at night, she performs every domestic and professional task he requires, from cooking and cleaning to managing his correspondence and preparing his studio. Only after the house is asleep does Ettie’s real life begin. She retreats to her outbuilding studio to work on her latest forgery, a study of apple cores. She reflects on her meticulous process of replicating Tartuffe’s methods layer by layer. She also considers Joseph’s discovery of her secret, feeling that his presence has complicated her private war with Tartuffe, though she is also partly relieved to be seen.

Joseph receives a parcel from his editor, Harry, containing a note of praise for his recent article and a camera. The gift makes Joseph uneasy, as the camera is a tool for capturing truth while he is immersed in deceit. He takes a photograph of Ettie, who stares directly and determinedly into the lens. While Tartuffe refuses to be photographed, Joseph documents the farmhouse, the landscape, and the local village. One day, he secretly photographs Tartuffe working on his masterpiece, The Feast. In the image, he sees a lonely, vulnerable man whose chaotic, colorful canvas seems devoid of life.

Ettie begins her forgery of The Feast. Because the canvas is too large to move, she must work entirely from memory in her outbuilding studio. She believes that the painting will be her masterpiece just as it is her uncle’s. Joseph starts joining her each night, sitting silently on the windowsill and watching her paint. His presence brings back memories for Ettie, and after he again asks why she doesn’t create her own work, she tries to paint something original but finds herself artistically blocked.

The narrative shifts to a lengthy flashback of Ettie’s experiences as a volunteer nurse during World War I. To escape Tartuffe, she showed him an official notice he could not read and fabricated aloud that it required one person per household to be involved in active war effort, leading Tartuffe to agree it should be her. At a hospital run by nuns, she found a new identity as “Nurse Blanc” and proved to be stoic and competent while treating horrific injuries. There, she fell in love with a patient, an Algerian soldier named Amir, who had lost an ear in battle. He opened her mind to a world beyond her small village and promised a future together. Their relationship became intimate in a field of wildflowers outside the convent, giving Ettie her first taste of hope and freedom.

Joseph sits in the studio with Tartuffe, unable to write. The articles he sends to his editor feel like lies, and he feels trapped by his knowledge of Ettie’s secret. When Tartuffe inquires after his writing, he tells Tartuffe he is writing about the theme of food in his work. He senses Tartuffe is intentionally keeping him close, demanding his attention and approval for The Feast, and worries the old man is trying to prevent him from spending time with Ettie.

The narrative returns to the flashback of Ettie’s time with Amir. He recovers and is ordered back to the front. Ettie begs him to desert and run away with her, but he tells her it is impossible. After a painful farewell, he leaves, promising to return. He writes to her, but the letters eventually stop. One day, a formal letter arrives informing Ettie of Amir’s death. She’s overcome with grief at the hospital and is dismissed for being “unstable.”

Her hopes for the future destroyed, she returns to the farmhouse. In an act of transformation, she cuts off her long hair, which Amir had loved. Unable to create original art, she finds solace in the methodical act of copying one of Tartuffe’s paintings, which marks the beginning of her career as a forger.

The narrative returns to the present, confirming that three years later, it was Ettie who received Joseph’s letter and, recognizing a fellow trapped soul, forged Tartuffe’s name on the one-word reply that brought him to the farmhouse: “Come.”

As August continues, Joseph focuses his photography on Ettie, setting up a darkroom in a cupboard to develop the pictures he keeps for himself. He struggles with his complicity in the lies surrounding Tartuffe’s work.

During a session in the studio, Tartuffe has a moment of raw vulnerability, confessing that his true artistic obsession is capturing light, something he feels he can never truly control. Joseph understands that Tartuffe’s art is a reflection of his tyrannical need to control everything and everyone around him. Tartuffe then violently crushes a pear in his fist.

Ettie is tormented by a blank canvas she keeps hidden, frustrated by her inability to create original art. She has become so accustomed to imitating Tartuffe that she fears she has lost her own artistic voice. One night, her frustration culminates in a raw, furious scream in the solitude of her outbuilding studio.

Joseph keeps his secret photographs of Ettie hidden throughout his room. His only picture of the two of them “together” is a double-exposure portrait made by taking separate pictures of themselves on the same frame of film, which he keeps tucked inside his copy of The Odyssey. One evening, he discovers the photo is missing. After a panicked search, he finds it placed under his pillow. On the back, Ettie has written a note asking him to meet her by the stream that night.

Joseph and Ettie meet at the stream under the moonlight. They wade into the water before making love on the grassy bank. The intimate encounter solidifies Ettie’s feelings, and she realizes what she feels for Joseph is a form of love rooted in being truly seen.

After they make love, Joseph passionately pleads with Ettie to run away with him. He describes a life of freedom where they can live and create together, away from Tartuffe’s control. Ettie hesitates, explaining her complicated bond with Tartuffe, whom she both hates and loves. Joseph professes his love for her, but their conversation is cut short when a light appears in Tartuffe’s window.

Before dawn, Ettie reflects on a nearby abandoned psychiatric hospital whose inmates remained even after its walls were torn down, seeing it as a metaphor for her own psychological imprisonment. She visits her mother’s grave, contemplating the failed escape that led to her death. Vowing not to repeat that pattern, Ettie imagines a future of genuine freedom and artistic autonomy. She decides she can build a life with Joseph, but it must be on her own terms, not as a dependent.

Joseph develops a photograph he secretly took of Ettie standing naked in a stream. The two had gone to wash a wine-stained tablecloth and she had undressed and swum. Now in his darkroom, he studies the image with intense longing and struggles over whether to destroy it so no one else can see it or keep it close. He ultimately hides the photograph inside a large decorative Chinese vase in his bedroom.

Facing a blank canvas, Ettie makes a conscious decision to banish her fear and past trauma. Looking inward for inspiration, she discovers a new sense of hope and light. She begins to paint, entering a focused state where she loses all track of time. She feels as if she is pouring her heart directly onto the canvas. She works through the entire night, only stopping when dawn breaks. Stepping back, she finally looks at her completed painting, feeling that an essential part of herself has been awakened.

The tension in the farmhouse escalates as summer wanes. One night, Joseph goes to the outbuilding and finds that Ettie is not working on her copy of The Feast. Instead, an original painting rests on the easel, an abstract, swirling vortex of golden light. Joseph immediately recognizes it as a self-portrait, telling her it captures her “ungraspable” and “alive” essence. Moved that he understands her work so deeply, Ettie kisses him. His belief in her talent reinforces his conviction that she must escape.

Ettie secretly mails a parcel containing her own paintings, the ones Raimondi had laughed at years ago and her new one, to the collector Peggy Guggenheim in Paris. She includes a note addressed to “P,” reading “Hang this upside down if you like. There is no right way up,” (306).

That night, she finds Tartuffe waiting for her in the dark kitchen. Terrified she will leave him like her mother did, he begs her to stay. He recounts a distorted version of their past, such as claiming that he helped her nurse the goldfinch back to health. When Ettie asks who her father was, Tartuffe’s silent fear confirms her suspicion: It was his friend and rival, Paul Cézanne. Back in her room, Ettie processes the revelation and concludes that her artistic talent is not inherited but forged through her own secret struggle.

Joseph finds respite from the oppressive environment in the farmhouse by visiting the village church. There, he reads the first letter he has received from his brother, Rupert, in two years. Rupert writes of his desire to leave the hospital. A second letter from his sister, Flora, confirms Rupert is improving and that the art Joseph has sent him has helped him. The news strengthens Joseph’s resolve to escape his current situation and start a new, honest life with Ettie.

Ettie puts the final touches on her forgery of The Feast. She has made a critical alteration to Tartuffe’s original composition: Instead of 12 place settings at the table, she has painted 13 with the added seat representing a place for her.

While Joseph is on the terrace, he hears Tartuffe upstairs in his bedroom, searching for the Chinese vase. Joseph freezes, realizing with horror that Tartuffe is about to find the naked photograph of Ettie hidden inside. Just as Ettie returns from the fields, her uncle’s grief-stricken wail erupts from the house. He shreds Joseph’s secret photographs and pages from The Odyssey and throws them from Joseph’s bedroom window. Tartuffe storms onto the terrace, screaming that Ettie is just like her mother. He attacks Joseph, choking him and demanding to know where Ettie is. Joseph doesn’t know. Tartuffe rampages through the house searching for her, but she has vanished. Standing at the front door, both men suddenly smell smoke.

Ettie is in the studio, where she has just set fire to Tartuffe’s original version of The Feast. She watches the canvas burn before piling all of Tartuffe’s other paintings, supplies, and the rotting food into a large bonfire. The narrator reveals that she orchestrated Tartuffe’s discovery of the photograph by suggesting that he use the vase, knowing the photograph was inside. With her own version of The Feast safe in the outbuilding and her original paintings on their way to Paris, she is ready to leave. She knows Joseph will follow and they will build a new life. She throws a match onto the pile, and the studio erupts in a fireball. After a moment of feeling trapped and unable to move, she escapes the burning building and runs toward her future.