Hai goes to King Philip’s Bridge believing he has run out of options, but he has not fully planned the moment until he sees the river below and starts to imagine drowning as a blameless surrender to gravity. He climbs over the railing, drops his pack, and edges along a lower beam toward the bridge’s center. Rain, exhaustion, and thoughts from New Hope about death by river push him forward, but when he sees what looks like a corpse in the water, he freezes. The "corpse" turns out to be a bedsheet, and the shouting voice belongs to an elderly woman in a riverside house who has spotted him and demands that he come back.

The woman, Grazina, refuses to believe Hai’s clumsy lies that he is merely inspecting the bridge. She guides him to a ladder, watches him cross back to safety, and threatens to call the police unless he comes to her house. Ashamed and shaken, Hai follows her inside. In her cramped, old-fashioned kitchen, she dries him off, gives him a cigarette, shows off her owl collection, and coaxes his name out of him, misunderstanding Hai as "Labas," the Lithuanian word for hello. Her talk is strange and funny, but her attention keeps Hai from slipping back toward the impulse that brought him to the bridge.

Grazina then takes Hai into the yard with a bag of dinner rolls and has him dump them in the mud. She stomps on the bread and urges Hai to do the same, turning the act into a bizarre ritual of release. As they crush the rolls together in the rain, Hai begins laughing and briefly feels lifted out of his despair. Grazina explains that bread was once precious in Lithuania, so destroying it now feels like freedom, then she prays aloud that God will protect strangers and keep people from perishing. For Hai, her absurd ritual and prayer become the first real interruption of his suicidal momentum.

Hai stays the night in a spare room. During the night he hears Grazina singing "Silent Night" in a clear, girlish voice and discovers her lying awake, singing as if in a trance, which unsettles him. In the morning, he wakes to the train whistle and remembers his dead friend Noah, whose old UPS jacket he still wears like a second skin. Hai checks the contact lens case hidden in the jacket pocket, listening for the pills inside, which shows that the possibility of self-destruction has not fully left him.

Over breakfast, Grazina feeds Hai latkes and insists he eat carrots because, in her private logic, carrots contain the will to live. Their conversation turns more serious: Hai admits he has only his mother, whom he cannot face because he has messed things up, and Grazina urges him to make peace with her. Grazina then reveals that she is eighty-two, isolated in a poisoned and abandoned neighborhood, and waiting indefinitely for a replacement live-in nurse after the last one disappeared. Because she needs help and because Hai has nowhere to go, she offers him her dead daughter Lina’s old room in exchange for company and practical assistance. Hai accepts, recognizing the offer as a narrow but real path away from the bridge.