Demon tries to follow Coach Winfield’s plan to taper off Percocet and OxyContin so his knee can heal, but withdrawal overwhelms him. He hides vomiting and soiled sheets, then relapses to function at school, increasingly focused on how long his pill bottle will last. With his prescriptions nearing the end in late December, Demon avoids Coach and Angus and treats “dying” as a real-feeling option.

Dori becomes Demon’s refuge and enabler. Demon spends most days at Dori’s farmhouse helping care for her sick father, Vester, amid home-care visits, loneliness, and the constant hostility of Jip the dog. Vester, only fifty-one, tells Demon about coal-plant exposure to asbestos and coal dust, the settlement that funded the family store, and the emptiness of thinking money can “buy your life back.”

Wanting a “real” romantic place for intimacy, Demon takes Dori to the old stripping house on the foreclosed Creaky Farm. He brings Thunderbird and candles stolen from Mr. Peg’s funeral, and they have sex on a quilt in the dark, tobacco-scented cellar where Demon once hid as a child. Afterwards, Dori chatters about small, death-tinged questions, and Demon feels briefly calm and whole.

Demon admits Dori keeps him from getting sick and embarrassed, giving him pills or scraps from Vester’s morphine patches to blunt withdrawal. He also reflects on the local drug culture, realizing the “dirty shirt” stains he once judged were from rubbing off time-release coatings to extract purer oxycodone for snorting or injecting—another method people use to silence their pain.

While running errands for Dori—picking up mail, prescriptions, and frozen groceries—Demon waits in a Walgreens line and runs into Tommy, a former foster kid. Tommy proudly shares he has a newspaper job and is “part of a family,” renting a garage from the McCobbs and reading their kids books. Demon recognizes the McCobbs, warns Tommy not to invest in Mr. McCobb’s latest scheme, and learns Tommy has already put in his own money.