Patch dreams of Grace asking about his biggest fear. In the dream, Patch admits he fears never seeing anything beautiful again, being trapped in Monta Clare, and ending up somewhere even darker without Grace. Grace promises that Patch will see beautiful places and that she will make sure of it, but Patch wakes in panic, drenched in sweat and overwhelmed by the loss of her.

Unable to stay still, Patch splashes cold water on himself, then runs through town to Monta Clare Fine Art. In the studio, Patch finds paper and begins preparing to paint. The brushes and watercolors he uses were stolen earlier from Goodwill while Patch was cleaning there, showing how urgently he needs a way to hold on to Grace.

Patch has almost no real artistic training. Patch remembers only basic color mixing from school and fragments of Miss Frey's lessons about artistic methods, but technique is not what guides him. Instead, Patch works from feeling, memory, and touch, trying to recover Grace's face by recalling her voice, the shape of her lips and jaw, the feel of her skin, the line of her brow, and the texture of her hair.

Through the night, Patch produces dozens of fragmented attempts. Patch paints her eyes over and over, then experiments with many possible versions of her hair, unable to know what is accurate and unable to stop. By dawn, about fifty images surround him, but they form only scattered pieces of a person rather than a complete portrait.

When Patch tries to fit the drawings together into a whole, the effort fails. Exhausted and in pain, Patch realizes he has created only fragments of a stranger instead of recovering Grace. In frustration and despair, Patch clutches the drawings, tears at himself, curses, and crumples the pages, revealing how completely grief and obsession are overtaking him.