Patch walks at the quietest hour, keeping off Main Street and breathing in the cold freedom of life after prison. He remembers the weeks before his release, when an older inmate, Terrence Roots, explained parole, re-entry, and the habits meant to keep a man from falling back. Patch listened, took notes, and gave the answers people wanted, but privately believed their advice missed the point because the purpose driving him had effectively died in his first year inside, when he accepted Callie was gone and mourned her in silence.

In the present, Saint helps hold Patch together from a distance. She appears at his parole hearings, calls every evening, and fills his freezer with labeled meals, and Patch makes sure to sound cheerful for her even when he is not. He spends his days doing simple work around the house, such as clearing the icy driveway, trying to fit himself into an ordinary routine.

Sammy arrives carrying expensive cognac and quickly drinks himself deep into a stupor. Because Sammy is too drunk to manage himself, Patch walks him back to the gallery, which forces Patch onto Main Street for the first time since returning home. The town looks mostly familiar, but the trip leads Patch into a place loaded with the years he spent away.

When Patch switches on the gallery lights, he finds his paintings of the missing girls still there, framed and displayed with care instead of sold off. Sammy has preserved them all, and Patch moves among the portraits as if he is walking back through more than a decade of his own life. He pauses especially at Eloise Strike and then at Callie Montrose, stopping just short of touching Callie's painted hair.

After studying the paintings, Patch notices a sack of mail sent to the gallery from the parents of missing girls who were trying to reach him through the work. The letters show that his paintings had become a point of hope and desperation for other families. Patch covers the sleeping Sammy with a blanket, thanks him for what he did, and says it is over now, revealing both gratitude and his effort to draw a line under the long, painful phase of his search.