Brian Church's death is the abrupt end of Lucy Fly's brief, invented future with him: after he paddles out to sea in his canoe and does not return, his body washes ashore. The death also exposes a falsehood in Lucy's private story about her origins, and, when she recounts it to Teiji, leaves a visible chill between them.

The imagined future

For the couple of weeks before the death, Lucy privately thought of herself as half Russian. She called herself Olga and imagined that she was pregnant, naming the baby she believed she carried Natasha. These beliefs made the days feel both fraught and exciting, but they were part of a fantasy rather than a lasting future: Lucy later recognizes that there was no baby.

The canoe and the discovery

Caroline does not come to school one morning. Lucy learns that Caroline's father, Brian Church, had set off to sea in his canoe the previous afternoon and had not paddled back; his body was found on the shore that evening. The incident is reported in local newspapers. Through that report, Lucy discovers that Brian had not come from Russia, as she had believed, but from the Netherlands. His death therefore brings both a physical loss and a correction to the identity around which Lucy had built her short-lived fantasy.

Lucy tells Teiji

Later, Lucy recounts the episode to Teiji while he holds her head and brushes his nose against her cheek. When she reaches Brian Church's suicide, Teiji draws back slightly. Lucy notices that her face has gone cold and wonders whether she has said too much; she then falls asleep. The next day, an unspoken distance remains between them. Teiji tries to hide that he has been shocked, but when he photographs Lucy on their walk to the station, the shutter no longer seems like his usual unconscious gesture: he peers through the viewfinder, shifts position, frowns, and finally takes the picture with resignation. The death thus returns not only as a childhood memory but as a disclosure that alters the closeness of the present encounter.