Evie stands in her father's office, having discovered a letter from her mother, Nura Sage. When she notices the spilled blue ink—a rare, enchanted variety—Griffin Sage enters and finds her. Evie presses him about the ink and reaches for his desk drawer. Griffin lunges at her, grabbing her by the hair to stop her, but Evie fights back, kicking him in the shin and escaping the room with a handful of papers. She bars the door and examines the documents, recognizing her own handwriting from her notebook—proof that Griffin used the enchanted ink to spy on everything she wrote. Among the papers, she finds a letter bearing King Benedict's name, confirming her father has been working for the king.

Evie confronts Griffin directly, asking if he planted the bomb. He admits he did, having used the entry points Evie unknowingly recorded in her journal and relayed them to King Benedict. Evie is devastated but presses further, and Griffin reveals even darker truths: he knew Otto Warsen intended to assault Evie, having accepted money from Warsen in exchange for Evie's "company." Griffin dismisses Evie's trauma and blames her for refusing Warsen and for working with The Villain, comparing her unfavorably to her mother.

The most shattering revelation comes when Griffin admits he was never sick with the Mystic Illness. He faked it, paying a healer to corroborate the lie, so he could maintain his secret identity as a member of King Benedict's Valiant Guard. The illness gave him a cover to disappear for long stretches without arousing suspicion. The entire financial burden Evie carried for three years—working for The Villain to pay for medicine and keep the household afloat—was based on a lie. Griffin had money all along but kept it for himself.

Griffin explains that King Benedict's guards identified Evie walking through the forest with The Villain, and from that day, Griffin began reporting to the king, turning Evie into an unwitting key to The Villain's downfall. He demands Evie help him retrieve the mated guvres for the king. Evie refuses, declaring, "I don't want to be good." Griffin grips her shoulders painfully, expressing devastation that she has "ruined her life," but Evie calmly tells him that he is the one who ruined everything.

As Griffin's body begins to fail—his words trapped, his limbs going limp—Evie reveals she already knew the truth before she walked in the door. She recognized the alias "East Marigold" as a character from a story Griffin once told her, and that clue led her to piece everything together. The pain medication she gave him earlier was actually a slow-acting sedative prepared by Tatianna. Kneeling beside her collapsed father, Evie delivers a final, devastating speech: she tells him there is no room in her world for someone who hurt her as he did, that his story is finished, and that whatever happens to him is no longer her concern. When Griffin rasps that The Villain is a monster, Evie replies, "We're all monsters in the end. At least mine lives in the light." Griffin closes his eyes as the sedative takes full effect.