Content warning: murder

Nighttime on a dock on a lake. Tea lights have been carefully arranged on the side of the dock to illuminate a path. Adele stands at the end of a dock holding an urn that contains her husband’s ashes. She takes the lid off the urn, and begins to sprinkle ashes on the water.

Her son Theo joins her and asks what she’s doing, grabbing the urn from her and accusing her of having an affair with his uncle, and killing his father. He’s found a doctor in Chinatown who will be able to prove his father was poisoned. Adele claims she did it to end his pain.

An ominous sense of disquiet holds together the music of this scene, in which a grieving son confronts his mother about her role in his father's death. First in repeated chords, then in rising sixteenth-note runs in the right hand of the piano, the music grows increasingly aggravated, as the tension between mother and son escalates.