Rivera Garza’s final chapters center her family’s response to Liliana’s femicide, their lifelong grief and trauma, and their memories of her as a sister and daughter. Liliana’s death shattered the family’s “sovereign republic,” leaving her parents and sister to cope with victim blaming and injustice. Her father is so bereft that he struggles to discuss certain matters, telling Rivera Garza that he finds it unbearable to repeat the (presumably misogynistic) words that the authorities used to describe Liliana, highlighting Gendered Violence and Systemic Injustice as Intertwined and illustrating the long-term emotional and psychological damage that such misogyny causes not only to those who experience it firsthand but also to their loved ones. Her mother’s grief manifested in desperate attempts to pursue information about Ángel’s whereabouts since the justice system failed. In writing the memoir, Rivera Garza not only gives voice to Liliana but also attempts to mitigate the injustice done to her family by allowing her parents to defend their daughter on the page as they have struggled to do in life. This also implicitly rectifies the aspersions cast on Ilda and Antonio themselves—e.g., by those who said that they allowed their daughter “too much” freedom. Liliana’s parents emerge as loving, thoughtful, and intelligent caregivers who wanted to protect their daughter and give her as many opportunities as possible. 

Nevertheless, they are not infallible. Like Liliana herself, Rivera Garza implies, the family could not fathom the danger she faced. Ilda’s belief that her daughter was safer with Ángel than on public transport exemplifies the gaps in awareness surrounding violence against women, which is overwhelmingly perpetrated not by strangers but by men whom women know. In this sense, Rivera Garza’s book contributes to a broader public discourse on the signs of intimate partner violence and the circumstances that may lead to femicide.

However, while the memoir may alert readers to these warning signs, its function is personal and emotional as well as public and practical. Rivera Garza’s research and writing of this memoir represent her search for symbolic justice in lieu of systemic injustice. Simultaneously, she has been chasing Liliana throughout the book’s composition. Rivera Garza, like her sister, craves companionship and closeness. She looks for Liliana in the streets of Azcapotzalco, at her grave, within the walls of her old apartment, and on the grounds of the university she attended. She chases her ghost in the interviews she conducts and within the written words of Liliana’s archive. In the book’s final pages, she finds her in the water: “Swimming was what we did together. We dashed into the world each on our own, but we came back to the pool to be sisters […] I want to meet her again in the water. I want to swim, as I always did, in my sister’s company” (301). Here and elsewhere, swimming’s meaning is multilayered. For one, it represents Liliana’s strength (emotional as well as physical) and her desire for freedom. In ending the memoir on this image, Rivera Garza thus signals her own healing while underscoring that her sister’s spirit was never broken by her experiences; she remains in the water, where Rivera Garza can find her. Moreover, swimming dates to a time before Liliana’s life became entangled with Ángel’s and thus suggests the innocence of her and her sister’s childhood. By figuratively restoring her sister to this happy period of her life, Rivera Garza provides another measure of symbolic justice, marking the resolution of the memoir’s exploration of Bearing Witness as Activism.