Tommye, who is visibly ill, asks Chase to take her to lunch. At a barbecue restaurant called Hawg Heaven, a man harasses Tommye, referencing her past in adult films. When he touches her, Tommye violently attacks him, incapacitating him and denouncing her past life. After the confrontation, she appears weak, pale, and sweaty, and her symptoms cause Chase to realize how seriously ill she is. After they leave, Chase drives to a lighthouse, where he begins sobbing. Tommye comforts him and reveals that she has three different strains of HIV as well as hepatitis A, B, and C and that she has already lived longer than expected. She explains that she waited too long to seek treatment and that the viruses are now too strong; attacking one would strengthen one or both of the others and speed up the progression of her illness. She attributes her illnesses to sexual encounters, drug use, and needle use during her time in Los Angeles. Tommye tells Chase that she’s done running from her past and that she came home for him because she doesn’t want to leave with regrets.

Chase recalls Tommye’s exceptional ability with numbers and her near-photographic memory for sports statistics, which she regularly supplied when they discussed or pretended to commentate games together. He also recalls one day in 1992 when Unc took Chase and Tommye to Game 7 of the National League Championship Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Chase was ecstatic, but he noticed that Tommye was withdrawn throughout the game: She ate nothing, offered none of her usual statistics, and didn’t join in the seventh-inning singing. As the game reached its tense climax in the bottom of the ninth inning, with the Braves mounting a last-minute comeback, Chase was completely absorbed. Sid Bream scored the winning run in the play known as “The Slide.” As the stadium celebrated the victory, Chase discovered that Tommye was gone. She reappeared 20 minutes later, saying there had been a line at the bathroom. On the drive home, Chase became suspicious, recognizing that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything that day. In the intermittent light from streetlights and oncoming cars, he saw in her face the little girl who ran through the Zuta that night in her flannel gown.

Tommye has Chase drive her to her father’s house on Sea Island, where she quickly retrieves a duffel bag despite the objections of a cleaning lady. Next, they go to her father Jack’s vacant former home in the Zuta. Tommye breaks in and leads Chase to the basement wine cellar. There, she reveals that Jack sexually abused her and her older brother, Peter, in that cellar when they were children. She recounts the night when Peter shot himself with Jack’s gun while Jack was abusing her. This, she explains, was the night she ran across the Zuta to Unc’s house. After revealing what happened, Tommye sends Chase to the barn. While he’s gone, she sets the house on fire. Explosions rock the mansion, and it’s quickly engulfed in flames. As sirens approach, they leave through an old logging road in the Zuta. That night, Chase carries a feverish Tommye to bed. While walking back through the pasture, he becomes overwhelmed with emotion. Unc finds him and explains that Tommye wanted to be the one to tell him about her illness. He also tells Chase that Tommye’s doctors had expected her to die already and that they must focus on what to do with the time she has left. The next morning, Tommye is weaker and needs Chase’s help getting to the bathroom, and she spits blood while brushing her teeth. Unc and Lorna then surprise Sketch with a pound cake and candles and, because they don’t know his actual birth date, designate August 1 as his birthday. Sketch blows out the candles and smiles as he holds Unc’s hand.

Chase recalls a night in his and Tommye’s teenage years when they got drunk at the county fair and passed out behind the tents. The next morning, a hungover Chase was awakened by Unc, who ordered them to muck out the horse stalls as punishment, although Tommye soon passed out, and Chase spent seven hours doing the work. Later that day, two men began to publicly harass Unc, calling him a “murdering thief” and referencing the Zuta First National robbery. They knocked off Unc’s hat and kicked it into a pile of manure. One of the men then poured beer in a horse’s face, causing it to panic and kick Unc squarely in the chest. Unc was thrown across the stall, breaking seven ribs and bleeding from his mouth. As Unc was being attended to, one of the men told Chase that he was lucky not to be Unc’s son, cruelly referring to the kidnapping and death of Unc’s son. The incident made Chase realize for the first time the extent to which people in the community blame and hate Unc. Chase began questioning the accusations against Unc, wondering why someone who supposedly profited from the robbery would still be shoeing horses after losing his career, inheritance, wife, and son. Unc was airlifted to the hospital and underwent surgery, leaving him unable to work normally for months. Chase took care of his horses after school, while Lorna worked double shifts to help compensate for the lost income. Chase also reflects that, despite everything Unc has endured, he has never seen him become angry.

Chase calls Dr. Myers, an HIV specialist, who explains the medical realities of Tommye’s condition. The doctor confirms that while many HIV patients can live long lives with medication, the combination of multiple HIV strains and hepatitis creates a “perfect storm” in which treating one infection can strengthen another. He also explains that once the body has deteriorated beyond a certain point, medication cannot reverse the damage. Later, Chase finds Tommye, who explains that she contracted HIV about four years earlier and that by the time she entered treatment, her immune system was severely compromised. Aggressive treatment strengthened her other HIV strains, and the medication she now takes only helps with her pain. Tommye then tells Chase about a dream she had of being in a lighthouse, where she found that the final pages of the book containing her life story were blank and received permission to leave and write them before returning. She asks Chase to forgive her for leaving and staying away and explains that shame kept her from contacting him despite following his work from California. She asks Chase that when the end comes, he not call 911, doctors, or a hospital and instead let her die at home. That night, Unc finds Chase on the porch and tells him that life’s bad moments help one appreciate the good, comparing the situation to a rose being worth the thorns.

Unc takes Chase, Lorna, Tommye, and Sketch to Ellsworth’s Sanctuary, where Unc teaches Sketch to fish. There, Tommye asks Unc to speak at her funeral and to bury her next to his son. That evening, a woman from Tampa arrives at the house, believing that Sketch may be her son who was kidnapped years earlier. The woman’s son has a scar on his right ear from a childhood accident. After checking Sketch’s ear and finding no scar, she leaves. Sketch, who understood what was happening, retreats to his room. Mandy then tells the family that she may have found a permanent home for Sketch with an attorney and his wife in Charlotte, North Carolina, pending approval. Soon after, Jack arrives in his Escalade and confronts the family. He tells Tommye that someone deliberately burned down the Zuta house, while she pretends not to know what happened. Jack then asks Chase whether he likes prison, prompting Chase to confront him and threaten to investigate him using the Freedom of Information Act. Unc intervenes. Jack subsequently notices Sketch and cruelly tells Unc, “Every man should have a son” (227). After Jack leaves, Chase angrily accuses Unc of being a lifelong coward, but Unc replies that he has more to lose. When Chase argues that Jack has already taken everything from him, Unc looks at the family around him and disagrees, telling Chase that “perspective often depends on where you’re standing” (228).

Chase recalls being rejected by Florida State University due to low SAT scores. Unc immediately drove him four hours to the campus. Without an appointment, they waited until the end of the day to see an admissions official, Ms. Irene Sullivan. Unc made an impassioned plea for Chase, assuring her that Chase was a hard worker and asking her to call him if Chase failed to make straight As or at least the dean’s list. He asked her not to “take him out of the game before he g[ot] his chance at bat” (231). Ms. Sullivan admitted Chase on academic probation. As Unc and Lorna dropped Chase off at college months later, Unc’s parting advice was to always tell the truth. Three and a half months later, Ms. Sullivan kept her word and called Unc.

On the porch that night, Sketch writes a note to Chase, asking if the woman who visited thought he was her son. Unc joins them, carrying a piece of marble, a hammer, and a chisel. He tells Sketch the story of Michelangelo, who believed that the form already existed within the stone and needed to be released. Unc compares Sketch to the rough piece of marble, telling him that despite being discarded and knocked around, there’s something valuable inside him waiting to be set free. Lorna then gives Chase a mason jar, and Chase, Sketch, and Unc spend an hour catching fireflies. After Sketch is put to bed, Unc begins talking to him about the fireflies as he once did with Chase. Afterward, Chase confronts Unc again about why he has never defended himself or fought back against Jack. He questions why Unc keeps his past a secret and accuses him of being a doormat. Unc refuses to explain, telling Chase that he won’t tell him what he wants to know because “[he] love[s] [him] that much” (237). Later, on his boat, Chase works on his newspaper article about Sketch and emails it to his editor, Red. Red calls Chase after reading it and tells him that his writing has changed, describing the formerly detached journalist as having been replaced by “someone with a pulse” (238). When Chase asks if he should rewrite the article, Red encourages him to keep looking.

This chapter consists of the newspaper article that Chase writes about Sketch, who is identified as John Doe #117. The article recounts the boy’s discovery by the railroad tracks and his move to a local boys’ home. It places his story in the larger context of the more than 500,000 unadopted children in the US foster-care system. The piece discusses the emotional effects of a seemingly parentless life, including feelings of abandonment, rejection, and low self-esteem that may persist for a lifetime. Chase argues that a central question for adoptees concerns their name, as it connects them not only to who they are but also to whose they are. He writes that changing a child’s name on official paperwork cannot erase the significance of the name originally known by their birth parent. The article concludes by noting that many of these children carry with them the stories of fictional orphans like Superman, Oliver Twist, and Huckleberry Finn because the endings of these stories are already known to them.

In a flashback to just under a year after Chase returned home from Florida State, he recalls confronting Unc on the porch. Having used the Freedom of Information Act to research the 20-year-old bank robbery, including interviewing a guard who transported Unc from prison to bury his son, Chase laid out the evidence implicating Unc. He pressed Unc for the truth, expressing his own pain from growing up under the shadow of the rumors and accusations surrounding Unc. Unc refused to answer directly. Instead, he grew emotional and told Chase that signing papers that made his son a ward of the state was the “second hardest decision [he’d] ever made” (245). Chase asked what the hardest decision was. Unc didn’t answer and walked away into his greenhouse. Afterward, Chase realized that his anger was actually directed at his absent father and that his desire to expose Unc’s mystery may have been connected to his own unresolved questions about his identity. That night, Chase wrote another short letter to his absent father, admitting, “I lied. I never quit looking out the window” (245).