After finishing a dinner shift, Hai comes home to 16 Hubbard and finds the house completely dark, cold, and empty. Alarmed because Grazina never leaves the lights off, Hai searches every room, then rides through the neighborhood calling for her. When Hai finally calls Lucas, Lucas angrily reveals that Grazina fell earlier that morning, missed her medication, and is now in a rehabilitation hospital. Lucas makes clear that Hai has failed in his caretaking role and says he is considering moving Grazina into Hamilton Home, reducing Hai’s job to keeping her comfortable and the house intact.

Shaken, Hai puts on Grazina’s nurse jacket and rides to the state-run facility. Moving through its bleak halls, Hai sees how the institution strips old age down to dependency and neglect. Pretending to belong there by flashing the scrub top, Hai reaches Grazina’s room and finds her asleep behind a curtain, already changed by the fall and by the advance of her illness.

When Grazina wakes, she does not recognize Hai and drifts through fragments of memory, war, religion, and confusion. Hai tries to meet her inside those shifting realities, joking as “Sergeant Pepper” and answering her questions as gently as he can. When Grazina asks him to tell a story about himself, Hai unexpectedly begins speaking about Noah, disguising him at first in a fable-like way before revealing the truth of their bond: Noah was the person with whom Hai felt most fully “okay,” and Noah later died from drugs.

As Hai continues, the story becomes a confession he has never made aloud. Hai explains, mostly to himself as much as to Grazina, that he left college after Noah’s death and could not tell his mother why because she never knew about Noah or about that part of Hai’s life. Grazina, slipping in and out of lucidity, understands enough to recognize that Hai is gay, calls him a “liggabit,” and offers a clumsy but sincere acceptance. But her mind keeps dissolving; when Grazina asks whether she is still herself if she cannot remember who she was, Hai cannot answer, and her fading awareness drives him into panic and grief.

Hai flees the room, breaks down outside in the snow, and shouts an apology to Noah and the dead. A security guard forces Hai to leave, and Hai, still unraveling, calls Sony. Hai asks to watch Gettysburg with him, and the two sit together in the Meyer’s Center lobby eating Goldfish while Sony talks through military strategy. Drifting between the movie, childhood memories, and thoughts about war imagery, race, and identification, Hai loses whatever theory he meant to explain, but the visit gives him a place to land after the night’s collapse.