These chapters investigate the theme of The Unreliability of Memory, demonstrating the failure of Irina’s attempts to control her own narrative. The ambiguity created by Irina’s unreliable narration, previously hinted at through Flo’s blog and Irina’s blackouts, erupts into the foreground. After she assaults Dennis with her camera, she experiences a hallucination that drives her to search for human remains. This kicks off a sequence of discoveries that confirm and undermine Irina’s narrative authority, making it more ambiguous which memories are true and which ones are invented. When she goes to find the human remains under the tree, she instead finds the skeleton of Fritz, resolving the mystery of his disappearance. This discovery marks a turning point; rather than confirming her memory, the absence of human remains exacerbates her mental health crisis, forcing her to question the memories that convince her she is a murderer.

Later, she uncovers the hidden Polaroids that prove that the murder was real after all. They become the only tangible proof of her memories, dismantling her capacity for performance and denial and confronting her with a truth too visceral to be manipulated or rationalized away. The profit she makes off the Polaroids validates the reality of her murderous actions. However, Mr. B’s sudden disappearance throws that validation into doubt, as if to suggest that Mr. B never really existed at all. This interplay between reality and invention underscores the collapse of Irina’s power over the world she keeps trying to control.

The recurring image of glass symbolizes the complete collapse of the boundary between hallucination and memory. This motif crystallizes during her attack on Dennis, when she hallucinates that “He glitters like glass. Glass. Glass in his cheek, glass in his eye” (190). In this moment, the glass appears as the signature projection of her violence, the detail that underscores her power over her victims. However, her later discovery that there was “no glass” on Dennis retroactively reframes the vision as a traumatic memory breaking through into her perception. The image finds its devastating origin point when she uncovers the Polaroid of the boy from the bus stop, his eye physically “ruined, with a piece of glass splitting it in two” (204). This revelation confirms that the glass is a literal detail from the repressed memory. The journey of this image from imagined horror to documented reality exposes the limits of Irina’s cognitive defenses, illustrating how the truth of her past actions can no longer be contained within the rationalizations she has constructed around them.

This section also clarifies how Irina weaponizes shared trauma to forge predatory bonds, twisting moments of potential intimacy into opportunities for control. The conversation in which she and Eddie disclose their histories of childhood sexual abuse initially appears to create a rare moment of genuine connection. Yet, Irina’s dismissal of her own trauma as something unimportant exposes her inability to process vulnerability as anything other than a prelude to domination. Irina is afraid of being vulnerable with Eddie because she sees emotional vulnerability as the only way to conquer him. The violent sexual assault she later films is a direct exploitation of the weaknesses he has revealed to her. Eddie’s email, in which he acknowledges that the affection she gives comes in “scraps” that echo past trauma (234), confirms that he recognizes this abusive pattern, even as he remains ensnared by it. This sequence illustrates a core mechanism of Irina’s character: She identifies and mirrors the trauma of others to refine her methods of control, ensuring her relationships are built on cycles of abuse, rather than mutual care.

Finally, the camera and photographs are complicated as they transition from being instruments of control to becoming uncontrollable artifacts of criminal history. As previously mentioned, the sale of the Polaroids to Mr. B serves a double purpose: Aside from allowing her to dispose of the evidence of a memory too transgressive for her to remember, the profit she makes validates her perception, assuring her that what she sees and remembers really happened. These images represent a past she cannot aestheticize or re-frame to her advantage the way she does when defending herself before Daniel’s mother in the opening chapter. In contrast, her decision to film the sexual assault on Eddie for her exhibition piece represents a terrifying synthesis. Here, she deliberately uses her camera to document a violent crime as art, erasing the line between her predatory artistic practice and her capacity for real-world harm. The camera becomes an accessory to violence, conquest, and consumption.