As life with her mother becomes more difficult, Cassidy longs for escape. She looks online for ways to help her mother and thinks of Wynton all the time. A month before she turns 14, Cassidy is hiding beneath a stack of coats at a party. A man finds her and gropes her, rubbing himself against her and restraining her when she protests. Cassidy feels frightened and ashamed but doesn’t tell her mother. At an RV park on her birthday, she approaches a group of kids and drinks beer with them. She goes off to swim with a boy named Ollie, who is 17. Her mother arrives and drags Cassidy away. Cassidy, hurt, shouts that she doesn’t have a mother.

Cassidy wakes up in the morning in their RV, Purple Rain, parked outside a yellow house. Her mother is gone. Cassidy smashes a mirror, the mirror “my mother and I have spent so much time inside together” (363). She finds a note from her mother explaining that she is abandoning the great adventure and wants Cassidy to be safe. Marigold is going to seek help and is leaving Cassidy here. A man wearing a black cowboy hat knocks on the door of the RV. Cassidy drives the RV away. He follows in an orange truck. After a chase, she crashes the RV near a town with a hot springs, where a group of naked people assemble. The man in the cowboy hat, Dexter, approaches to help her. Cassidy feels terrified, abandoned, and alone.

Cassidy realizes she saw her mom talking to Dexter at a wine festival once. He gave her his contact information. Searching through the RV, she finds a bank card with the name Mary Snow. She guesses who the man in the cowboy hat is and feels “I’m jumping on a trampoline inside myself because I have a father” (379). He admits he didn’t know he had a daughter, but finding out “felt like some kind of redemption. Some kind of grace” (380). Cassidy is finally safe and happy.

Cassidy tells Wynton that the two of them are okay.

Dizzy, holding her father’s hand, relates to the moment in Alonso’s story when he learned who his true father was and began giving off light. Miles is angry. Dizzy is stunned and overjoyed to realize that Cassidy is her sister. She is convinced that Cassidy led them here so Theo can wake Wynton with his trumpet. Their father says he can’t go but brings the trumpet and says Clive can play it. Dizzy is stunned again to realize that love doesn’t go two ways; “Their father didn’t love them back. That’s why he left,” she thinks (387).

Bernadette’s letter to her children describes the morning she met their father. Victor Fall contacted her parents about doing a wine tasting. He visited the bakery with his son Clive, whom Bernadette describes as mangy and looking like trouble, but she was intrigued. Bernadette, after the death of her brother, had been left feeling “like a nothing girl. But one who wanted to take apart the world with her bare hands” (392). Clive was interested in cows and adored his brother.

Theo entered, and Bernadette caught her breath. He was beautiful, and he carried a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He chatted with Bernadette and teased Clive, and when both the Fall brothers smiled at her, Bernadette felt something beginning. She became their friend, almost a sister. Bernadette learned that Victor forced the boys to fight one another. One night, when she and Clive catch Theo sleepwalking in the vineyard, playing his trumpet, they noticed how animals came to sit around him. Bernadette felt that the moment was divine, that Theo was somehow magical, and she was also sharing this moment with Clive.

Miles feels his emotions boiling over. He is angry at their father for disappointing Dizzy. He goes back inside looking for Sandro and sees pictures of Theo with Cassidy. Miles “wondered now how much of the yearning at the core of his being, the feelings of emotional exile, all the lonely hope-bitten hours, were because this man had left him” (409). Theo brings in Sandro, who was hiding under his bed; Sandro tells Miles that Theo is the beloved person he has been calling “Beauty,” and that he plans to stay with Theo. This further rejection is too much for Miles.

Cassidy describes what life is like when you have a house, a bike, a father, and friends. She finds a wedding band in her father’s pocket. She learns her father is a synesthete, like she is. Still, she feels, “my mother has become my shadow, my witness, my rage, my enemy, my ally, my yearning, my joy, my language” (414). She begins to write “in the time of forever” stories. She gets postcards from her mother, who is traveling around the world.

Felix, Dizzy, and Miles leave Theo’s house, but Miles is so angry he asks to go back.

Miles returns to the house feeling that his father is a magnet, and Miles is a metal shaving. His father says he won’t return because he doesn’t belong there. Miles describes how his mother leaves a dinner out every night and says how much he and Wynton have missed their father. Theo reveals that he thought the family had forgotten about him but has watched the kids grow up from afar. He’s read Miles’s poems and watched Wynton perform music. Miles feels that his father really sees him, and when Theo hugs him, Miles “was falling through years of pain and sadness” but feels “that here was someone who knew how to catch him” (425). Theo says he will come try to wake Wynton.

Bernadette writes to no one that she wants to reveal what happened. She realizes how protective Theo is of Clive, and how Clive is fragile. Theo begins sleepwalking to the bakery, and Bernadette realizes he is her beshert, her destiny. She says she had fallen in love with him, is still in love with him, and is filled with regret for what she did next.