Before the prison visit, Hai crushes his pills at HomeMarket and takes Dilaudid in the waiting room, so he enters the corrections office already high. He follows Sony through security and into the visiting booths, where Aunt Kim is startled to see him after two years. The visit begins awkwardly, but the three settle into strained family talk about Tết, prison life, and Hai’s mother, with Aunt Kim reminiscing about the expensive Louis Vuitton key chain she once bought Hai’s mother before their fallout.

When Aunt Kim sends Sony away to buy Hai a soda, she uses the brief privacy to confess what she has hidden from the family: Sony’s father, Minh, died nearly four years earlier in a car fire in the woods near Brattleboro. She says Hai’s mother does not know, and Sony still believes his father is alive, remarried, and working at a post office because Aunt Kim has let that fiction continue. Hai is shocked and angry to be handed this secret, but Sony returns before the conversation can go further. Back in the open visit, Sony talks eagerly about wanting to see his father, while Aunt Kim deflects and then turns the moment into a plea that Sony become the educated, successful second chance she never had.

After the guard ends the visit, Sony gives Aunt Kim the pink origami penguin he made for her. As she is led away, Aunt Kim asks Hai to keep lying to his mother and say she is still in Florida with a big car. Outside in the freezing dark, Hai and Sony wait for the bus. At the bus stop, Hai rejects Sony’s image of him as a future writer or college success and admits that his life feels fragmented, as if everything about him except his physical presence has become ghostlike. Sony answers with his own blunt reflections about how his mind works, how goodness does not come easily to him, and how a life can still matter if someone else remembers it.

Back in East Gladness, Hai remembers he promised Grazina he would visit his mother for Lunar New Year, but he cannot face her in person. Instead he calls from outside the house and keeps up the lie that he is studying late at medical school. His mother, who is inside with her coworker Ms. Do, tells him she is proud of his courage and believes he has built a future through his own effort. Her tenderness and faith deepen Hai’s shame, especially as he notices the house, the money jar he once stole from, and the ordinary life he has abandoned without telling the truth.

Still high and emotionally unmoored, Hai rides through town in a delirious state, yearning for the dead and unreachable, and calls out in the night for his grandmother and for Minh. He slips on black ice outside 16 Hubbard and falls. Grazina comes out in her nightgown, half speaking from her wartime memories, and gently tends to him as he breaks down and admits he cannot quit drugs. Trying to soothe him, she tucks a radio into his jacket so music plays against his chest, assures him he is not beyond saving, and, at Hai’s request, cuts some of his hair to help lift the weight his mother spoke of.