After Snow poisons Lenore Dove, Haymitch is trapped in recurring nightmares of feeding her the fatal gumdrop, while lines from "The Raven" echo through his mind and turn Snow’s threat into a permanent sentence: anyone Haymitch loves will die. To protect others and punish himself, Haymitch drives away every visitor, including Blair, Burdock, and Asterid, and only stops when he wounds Asterid by throwing rocks. The Capitol keeps him alive with weekly money and food deliveries, but Haymitch spends his days in silence and his nights drinking sleep syrup, wanting death yet unable to abandon his promise to stop future reapings.

Desperate to find Lenore Dove, Haymitch first searches the District 12 graveyard and then the Covey house, where hearing her song on a fiddle sends him deeper into grief. When the sleep syrup runs out, Haymitch begins buying rotgut from Bascom Pie and roaming drunk until he realizes the Covey would have buried Lenore Dove somewhere she loved: the woods. He spends weeks searching until Burdock, still angry but moved by pity, leads him to a hidden Covey graveyard where Haymitch finally finds Lenore Dove’s stone.

Haymitch lies on Lenore Dove’s grave for two days, confessing everything, begging forgiveness, and asking to be released from his promise. When she gives no direct answer, Haymitch buries the flint striker, snake, and bird before returning home and falling back into the same nightmare. Soon after, he wakes from another drunken blackout in a back alley and sees orange graffiti reading, "NO CAPITOL, NO HANGING TREE!" Remembering Maysilee’s observation about orange paint on Lenore Dove’s fingernails, Haymitch realizes the message is Lenore Dove’s hidden act of resistance and accepts it as her sign that he must keep living and keep his promise.

Haymitch’s grief then turns more violent and haunted, as memories of Panache and Silka invade his sleep and he begins sleeping with a knife. On the morning of the Victory Tour, Effie Trinket finds him in that state, repeats the Capitol cover story that his family died in an accident and Lenore Dove from appendicitis, and forces him back into public view. With help from Proserpina and Vitus, Effie gets him cleaned up and onto the train, where Plutarch privately explains that Magno has been fired, Drusilla is gone, and Effie was installed at the last minute.

During the Victory Tour, Haymitch endures ceremonies before the families of the dead tributes, drinks through the celebrations, and is finally taken by Plutarch to an unbugged attic in District 11. There Plutarch argues that Haymitch’s arena sabotage proved he could imagine change and says the fight against Snow may take generations, but Haymitch rejects the idea because every attempt he made ended in more deaths. Haymitch avoids Plutarch for the rest of the tour, denounces him back in District 12 for helping turn slaughter into Capitol propaganda, and then withdraws completely into his house. He lets Capitol News play constantly, speaks to almost no one except Bascom Pie when he needs liquor, and ends the chapter understanding that his future is an annual punishment: every birthday will bring another pair of tributes to mentor toward death.