Saint and Nix revisit the choices that pulled Saint into police work and into Patch’s orbit. Nix reminds Saint that she turned down an Ivy League college and ignored his advice to spend a year on desk duty before training, while Saint remembers that she began digging into Marty Tooms on her very first day and never stopped. The chapter then shifts back to the following winter, when Patch drove across the state chasing another thin lead and asked Saint to check on Ivy Macauley.

When Saint gets no answer at Ivy’s house, instinct sends her around back. Through the French doors, Saint sees Ivy sprawled on the kitchen floor, and Ivy is pronounced dead at the scene. Patch receives the news without visible emotion, does not cry at the funeral, and leaves Monta Clare the next day, suggesting that Ivy had already been lost to him long before her physical death.

After that memory, Saint and Nix discuss the unresolved case. Saint wonders how Marty Tooms and Eli Aaron ever became connected, because Tooms was a local man with medical training while Aaron did not seem educated. The conversation then turns to Grace. Nix pushes the psychological explanation from Patch’s evaluation: Grace may have been a figure Patch created out of extreme trauma, a tough girl invented by a terrified boy trapped with a monster. Saint admits Patch’s descriptions change from telling to telling, but Saint also argues that severe trauma does not prove Grace was imaginary, especially because some core traits remain consistent.

Nix presses Saint on why she has sacrificed so much for this possibility, noting that she skipped her prom, gave up a coveted college place, and keeps replaying Patch’s interview tapes. He broadens the argument into a bleak view of policing and morality, saying that evil is common, authority does not guarantee goodness, and the law does not cleanly measure guilt. When Saint notices an old missing-girl poster outside the diner, Saint still insists Grace could be alive somewhere. Nix rejects that hope and says that if Grace is out there, she is dead, but he also knows Patch will never accept that and will keep searching anyway.