As the rebuilt house nears completion, Patch throws himself into finishing it with obsessive precision. After the framing is done and the stucco dries, he spends a full week painting the exterior white and the shutters an Aegean blue, choosing each detail according to the memories of Grace that he replays in the dark.

Patch keeps treating Grace’s old stories as instructions. He convinces himself the house needs heart pine floors, then spends another month searching reclamation yards until he finds boards that match the picture in his mind. Grace’s remembered descriptions of bedrooms, boarders, makeup lessons, and a traveling preacher help shape the house into something larger and more elaborate than Patch himself needs.

Because Grace once spoke about Thanksgiving formalities, Patch builds five bedrooms, a large den and kitchen, a dining room, and even a glass-roofed room that Saint has to identify for him as an orangery. The scale of the finished home makes clear that Patch is not building for his own practical life, but for an imagined future tied to Grace.

The only part Patch cannot force into place alone is the external staircase. He fights with it until frustration and hatred reduce him to exhaustion, and he finally accepts help from Saint’s cousin Patrick, a carpenter from Brookfield, who fixes it over Labor Day weekend. When Patrick makes the staircase work, Patch is so relieved that he hugs him awkwardly until Patrick looks to Saint for rescue.

At a meal of Brunswick stew and corn muffins, Saint lightly tells Patch to stop scaring people, and her grandmother praises the house. Their presence briefly turns Patch’s private fixation into a shared moment of approval, even as the chapter emphasizes how completely Grace’s memory still governs his choices.