Alex declines the cash to which Bruno suggests a DVD player or plasma TV. Bruno provides Alex with his phone number on a card and offers Alex cash. Alex stops and talks with Bruno on his way back to the hospital.

Alex also promises to stop by Helene's apartment after his visit with Margot's mother. In his lunch conversation with Helene they discuss his plans to meet with Margot's mother in what has been a yearly meeting with her for the past eight years on the anniversary of Margot's murder. Alex meets his friend Helene, who is his sister's lover and domestic partner, for lunch in her restaurant, where he reads in a newspaper that two male bodies were uncovered near the Lake Charmaine. Alex provides Bruno assurance and carries Bruno's son into the emergency room. Alex is the only person there who Bruno will trust with his hemophiliac son who had fallen off the couch. There he finds a thug-looking man named Bruno holding his son in his arms and demanding to see Alex. While attending to a young girl and her parents Alex hears a commotion in the admission section and rushes to the scene. The next scene is eight years later when we see Alex arriving at the hospital where he works as a practicing pediatrician. He is last seen falling back into the water. Alex then hears Margot's cry for help, swims to shore, and is knocked unconscious as he attempts to exit the water using the ladder on the dock. After having a little argument about the cold relationship he has with his sister Anne, Margot comments she will 'butt out' and swims back to the shore to check on the dog that was left in the car. After nightfall they end up snuggling together on a wooden raft in the center of the lake. Thereafter they disrobe and romantically swim naked in the lake. There, Margot uses Alex's pocketknife to add an additional hash mark to the many already present below the heart.

What appears to be the following day Alex and his wife Margot drive to a secluded lake, Lake Charmaine, where they have childhood memories and a carved heart with their initials, M+A, on a tree near the lake. It is revealed that the main character, Alex Beck, has been in medical school for nine years. The movie opens with a nighttime dinner scene at a country home with many of the main characters in the movie. The novel takes place in the U.S., while the movie takes place in Paris. The novel and movie have significant differences.

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