The necktie that Eddie uses to bind Daphne’s wound in the crashed Chevrolet functions as a symbol of improvised care and familial devotion between Eddie and Daphne. Eddie explains that his mother bought the tie for his first day at Houghton Mifflin, connecting it to his professional identity, but when he wraps it around Daphne’s bleeding head in the dark, the tie is repurposed from a marker of career respectability into an instrument of survival. Eddie jokes that his sister once wore their father’s tie as a headband, “aggressively Woodstock,” framing the object as something already prone to being claimed by the next generation. The tie’s symbolic meaning deepens when Daphne, having climbed out of the car alone into the snowstorm, removes it from her head and ties it to a tree branch so that she can find her way back to Eddie. In this act, the tie transforms again: No longer a bandage binding a wound, it becomes a navigational anchor, a promise of return. The tie thus traces the arc of The Construction and Deconstruction of Family Narratives, as its passage from Eddie’s pocket to Daphne’s head to the branch of a tree enacts the way their bond was formed not through legal or biological ties but through mutual dependence in crisis. That neither Daphne’s mother nor any authority figure ever acknowledged the significance of this improvised rescue underscores how the tie, like the relationship it symbolizes, remained invisible within the family’s official story for decades.