Frankie awoke in a hospital after her crash, in pain and disoriented, and learned from a police officer and her father that she was being charged with DUI and had nearly killed a bicyclist on the Coronado Bridge. Her father, terrified and angry, asked if she wanted to die and told her she seemed broken. Frankie realized she might have been courting death and admitted she had been living this way since Vietnam.

Back home in her childhood bed, Frankie wrestled with craving pills, shame, and the fear she had been suicidal. Remembering Henry’s advice to seek help and believing only veterans might understand, she went to the new VA medical center to attend a Vietnam veterans’ rap session. There, a male attendee denied her entry, insisting women had not served in Vietnam and that her presence would silence the men. Frankie left, enraged and humiliated, and screamed outside.

With no one to turn to, Frankie decided to face the man she had almost hit. She found Bill Brightman’s home, apologized, and offered to replace his bike, but he reminded her she had nearly ended his life and asked her to remember the families at stake when drinking and driving. He ended the conversation and went inside, leaving Frankie steeped in guilt.

Frankie returned home to her worried mother and retreated to her room, where she continued taking pills. In a drugged, dreamlike state that blended memory and grief for her brother Finley, she believed she heard him calling, took her surfboard into the dark, empty beach, and paddled into the cold ocean. Exhausted, numb, and tempted by oblivion, she drifted and began to succumb to the water.

Red lights and sirens brought her back as she found herself in an ambulance beside her soaked father, who said she had taken too many pills and that her parents feared she had tried to kill herself. Despite Frankie’s insistence that it had been a dream and not a suicide attempt, the ambulance arrived at a psychiatric ward, and she discovered she was restrained for a mandatory thirty-six-hour hold. As orderlies approached with a needle, she screamed that she had not tried to kill herself; sedation was her last memory.