Back in the old house, Patch goes through the collection he built during years of obsession, a mass of materials that once made him feel closer to Grace. He sees shelves sagging under newspapers and clippings, walls covered in marked-up maps, and catalog pages assembled into possible outfits from scraps of remembered words.

The room also holds nearly fifty journals filled with late-night notes that Patch once treated as clues. He had tried to turn fragments such as colors, fabrics, sounds, and smells into possible identities, even cutting together faces and hairstyles and repainting details like eye color. Looking at it now, Patch recognizes the work as madness rather than progress.

Because Patch now feels the heavy certainty that Grace is gone, or because his mind is finally clear enough to judge what he made, he decides to destroy it. He tears everything from the walls, piles the papers and collages into a metal trash can outside, drenches them with gasoline, and sets the whole archive on fire.

As Patch breathes in the smoke and closes his eye, the burning papers pull him into a buried memory. In that remembered scene, an unnamed female voice shouts for Patch to wake up, coughs through smoke, and tries to drag him out while admitting she is not strong enough to save him alone. When Patch opens his eyes again, he looks up through tears at the night sky, as if the fire has reopened a part of the past he had kept locked in darkness.