By October, Hai has settled into a daily rhythm at HomeMarket. Riding an old bike he found in Grazina’s basement, Hai learns that the restaurant’s comforting, homemade image is mostly a performance: old food is scraped, reheated, relabeled as fresh, and sold through BJ’s cheerful patter. Even so, the place becomes real to Hai through repetition, shared meals, crude improvisations, and the strange intimacy of labor.

Hai comes to know the crew as a collection of exhausted but vivid personalities: foul-mouthed cashier Maureen, muttering drive-thru worker Russia, mostly silent dishwasher girl Amanda, and Wayne, whose rotisserie chicken is the store’s true draw. A sudden flood of Catholic school students after homecoming nearly breaks the staff, but they survive by scrambling together. As shifts pile up, Hai learns everyone’s smells, habits, and breaking points, and HomeMarket starts to feel like a closed world governed by work, grease, and fatigue.

That fragile solidarity is tested when a wealthy father and his sons from a nearby tennis camp make racist jokes about Wayne while ordering food. BJ freezes instead of confronting them, and Maureen is the only one who pushes back before the family leaves in anger. Afterward, BJ apologizes and offers to move Wayne off the chicken line, but Wayne refuses because roasting chicken connects him to his father, grandfather, and a family tradition of Black pitmasters. Wayne’s insistence turns humiliation into defiance, but his hurt changes the mood of the whole shift. Later, outside after work, Sony tells Hai that Kim’s appeal was denied and that Sony wants to pursue military service, possibly the Honor Guard, to earn money and help bail Kim out; Hai, despite distrusting the military, encourages Sony anyway.

The chapter then shifts into Hai’s past. Hai recounts being born in Vietnam after the war, immigrating as a child to Connecticut, and being raised by women scarred by hardship. Although Hai once became the first in the family to attend college, addiction pulled Hai out of school and back home. In that state, Hai lied to his mother by claiming Hai had been accepted to a Boston medical program, using a divinity-school pamphlet as proof. Because Hai’s mother desperately needed hope after the grandmother’s death, she believes the story and lets herself imagine that Hai will become a doctor and rescue the family from their small, damaged life.

On the day of departure, Hai cannot face a true goodbye, takes a bus-ticket fantasy as far as Hartford, then admits to himself that there is no medical school and no plan. Instead of going to Boston, Hai wanders until Hai enters New Hope Recovery Center and, for the first time, says that Hai needs help. From there the narration expands into memories of overdose, early heroin use, and the broader opioid crisis swallowing East Gladness. Hai recalls rehab as a place of boredom, commerce, tenderness, and deceit: insurance only covers three weeks, patients smuggle drugs, counselors offer slogans, and Hai still lies to his mother on the phone about medical school. In the end, Hai understands that the lie came from grief and helpless love: Hai wanted to restore light to Hai’s mother after the grandmother’s death, and lying was the only false cure Hai could imagine.