Maureen wakes in the van, and the group continues north through Vermont with Maureen driving, Sony guiding them from a printed map, and Grazina unusually alert after Hai gives her extra medication. Sony leads them off the main road into Devil’s Leap State Park and then farther down a gravel path to the place where his father’s car burned three years earlier.

At the crash site, they find almost nothing left except a small blackened patch and a half-burned headrest. Sony kneels before it, places his cap on it, and speaks to his dead father, promising to become someone his father would be proud of and to remember him. Maureen wraps her apron around the headrest like a swaddled child, BJ embraces Sony, and Hai joins them, the workers from HomeMarket briefly becoming a physical, emotional unit around Sony’s grief.

Sony’s mourning turns into one of his historical reenactments as he shouts Civil War commands and imagines troops moving into battle. Grazina joins the moment by yelling with him, and the others echo the charge, but Sony alone runs forward into the woods and collapses against a tree, weeping. The group waits while he cries, giving him room to finish the breakdown he has been carrying toward.

Afterward, they halfheartedly search for the diamond Sony hoped to recover from the driver’s side of the wreck, but the ground is buried under years of leaves and growth, and nothing is found. The narrative then reveals what Hai learns later: Minh was not a South Vietnamese commando, but a laundry worker on a U.S. Army base who borrowed military clothing for appearances, and his war wound came from an American grenade accidentally triggered in the laundry, not from a Vietcong attack.

As they leave, Hai tells Sony he can go home now, and BJ carries Sony back toward the van. Grazina comforts Sony by saying loss is not new and that what he makes with his own hands is truly his. On the drive to pick up the two bags of creamed spinach, Hai notices spring arriving in a way he never has before, Maureen sings "The Parting Glass," and she gives Sony a scratch-off ticket that wins only another ticket, ending the chapter in a fragile, exhausted fellowship.