Richard avoids his French exams because he is hospitalized with a stomach gunshot wound. He survives because the bullet passes clean through without rupturing vital organs, and he experiences the ride to the hospital as a strange, luminous drift toward death. Henry dies from two self-inflicted head shots after living more than twelve hours, and Richard fixates on Henry’s “triumphant” concentration, interpreting Henry’s suicide as a deliberate, principled gesture shaped by Julian’s teachings about duty and sacrifice.

Richard eventually graduates from Hampden and spends a summer in Brooklyn, then returns to campus to finish school amid whispers about the Albemarle incident. The official story becomes that Henry was suicidal and Richard was wounded in a struggle for the gun, a version that protects the survivors but also reshapes Richard’s self-image. Richard cannot attend Henry’s funeral, but Francis does; Camilla takes Charles to Virginia instead. Henry’s mother visits Richard and later gives Richard Henry’s BMW, explaining Henry had begun transferring it to Richard before dying.

In the years after Henry’s death, the surviving friends drift apart. Francis becomes anxious and homebound in Manhattan, seeing doctors and rarely venturing out; Camilla and Charles live with their grandmother in Virginia, with Camilla’s communications thinning as Charles’s sobriety falters. Around Richard’s graduation, contact resumes briefly; Richard dates Sophie Dearbold, moves with her to Southern California for her dance career, and then breaks up with her because Richard is emotionally closed off and frighteningly remote. Richard immerses himself in Jacobean tragedy and later writes a dissertation, drawn to literature’s “catastrophe” and moral rot.

Francis later sends Richard a farewell letter suggesting suicide, and Richard flies to Boston to find Francis alive but recovering from wrist cuts. Francis reveals he is going to marry Priscilla—an amiable but vacuous woman—because his grandfather discovered Francis’s relationship with a man named Kim and threatens to cut him off financially. Camilla arrives in Boston as well, and the three spend rainy days together; they attend Ash Wednesday mass, drink, and talk uneasily about Charles, who cycles through jobs, relapse, brief treatment, and ends up in Texas with an older married woman, effectively estranged from Camilla.

As Richard and Camilla part at the train platform, Richard proposes; Camilla refuses, saying she cannot leave her grandmother and finally admitting she still loves Henry. Richard drives back across the country, mourning the definitive loss of Camilla. Richard then briefly accounts for the later fates of various Hampden acquaintances and notes Julian has remained unreachable and emotionally detached when contacted. The epilogue closes on Richard’s unsettling dream of Henry in a ruined, futuristic city, where Henry claims he is “not dead” but restricted—leaving Richard with the sense that memory and guilt keep the dead present.