During Patch's first week home, Saint still cannot see him. Every morning Saint goes to the old house on Rosewood Avenue, watches his covered window, and sometimes sits in the yard waiting. Ivy tells Saint that Patch is sleeping and tired, so Saint remains outside, held back by his absence and her own uncertainty.

Trying to express what Saint feels, Saint spends hours making Patch a pirate card with careful details and a figurehead in his likeness. In the end, Saint decides the card is childish and throws it away, which shows both Saint's tenderness toward Patch and Saint's fear of reaching for him the wrong way.

At school, Saint endures rumors about Patch's condition, including exaggerated stories that he returned disfigured and blind after what happened in the woods. Misty approaches Saint in homeroom and asks how Patch is doing, even offering to bake him a strudel. Saint says nothing, though Saint wants to claim a private closeness to Patch and protect what Patch went through from gossip.

After school, Jimmy Walters keeps walking home with Saint and brings Saint wildflowers, which Saint discards once he leaves. Jimmy awkwardly suggests helping Saint photograph the beaver at the marsh, but Saint twists the conversation into a joke until Jimmy is mortified. The misunderstanding finally makes Saint laugh hard, and the moment matters because Saint realizes it is the first time in a long while that Saint has felt anything other than the pain of the past year.