Patch meets Walter Strike, a man who walks with a cane and speaks with pride about his family’s fierce independence. As they walk together beneath the palmettos, Walter explains that his daughter Eloise vanished when she was fifteen, and he is still angry that the police treated her age as if she were nearly grown and therefore less urgent to save. Walter also rejects the local belief that Eloise simply ran off with someone, because he knows his daughter would not have left that way.

While they continue through Charleston, Walter describes the life Eloise left behind. He tells Patch that his wife still bolts awake whenever a car slows outside at night, as if Eloise might finally come home, make herself a sandwich, and fill the house with music again. Listening to Walter, Patch keeps trying to assemble Grace from other families’ memories of their missing daughters, but he still cannot complete that picture.

The two men spend the afternoon at Middleton Place, where the beauty of the plantation gardens jars with Walter’s account of the day Eloise disappeared. Walter says the police followed a trail that stretched all the way into black-water swamps, a detail that shows how long the search continued without producing the one answer the family needed. When they pause near a gazebo to watch a bride pose for photographs, the unspoken loss becomes clear: Walter will likely never see Eloise at her own wedding.

As evening falls, Walter describes how Eloise’s disappearance damaged the rest of the family as well. He says his son, Coop, lost his way afterward and now lives quietly, as though the world itself has gone dull. Before they part, Walter asks Patch how many parents like him he has met, and the exchange reminds Patch of the many faces and charity workers tied to missing-person cases across the country. Walter then thanks Patch for coming simply to hear Eloise’s name and leaves him with blunt advice: a person gets one real shot, so Patch must aim carefully and make it enough.