Reggie’s evolving role changes the narrative in this section, enhancing the claustrophobic tension. Though he initially presents himself as an innocuous salesman, Reggie’s true past and his role as a law enforcement agent add complexity to the novel, and Reggie’s presence helps inform the theme of The Difference Between Revenge and Justice. Reggie pushes back against Anna’s plan for nonviolent justice, asking her, “Why do you get to decide that? What about the families of those soldiers killed alongside your brother? […] I’m sure some of them would gladly murder the likes of Sally Lawrence or Jack Lapsford with their bare hands” (245). This dialogue both encourages Anna to decenter herself from the situation and foreshadows the revelation of Reggie’s identity as the son of the railroad engineer killed in the 1942 explosion. The rhetorical questions Reggie poses expose the arrogance within Anna’s plan. By monopolizing justice, she unconsciously repeats the conspirators’ selfishness, elevating her own pain above the collective grief of others. His presence shifts the moral stakes from personal vengeance to communal reckoning.

Reggie’s motives crystallize most clearly in this section, as the very questions he poses to Anna expose his personal stake. His anger reveals that he does not see himself as detached law enforcement but as someone with skin in the game, the son of the railroad engineer killed in the explosion. This revelation reframes his presence on the train: while Anna seeks confession and closure, Reggie is driven by his own grief and desire for vengeance. His fixation on violent justice positions him as Anna’s mirror opposite. She clings to procedure and confession, while he is willing to embrace bloodshed. By sharpening the conflict between these two approaches, Sager highlights how grief warps the pursuit of justice, bending it toward obsession and violence.

In this section, Sager also introduces the theme of The Pursuit of Truth and the Gray Areas of Morality, especially through the lens of Edith. Edith struggles with the weight of her past actions, and she realizes that her actions were pointless: “Nothing she’d done has helped anyone but her and her co-conspirators. Soldiers died and lives were destroyed for absolutely no reason. […] And Edith has never gone back [to Germany], which is more telling than she cares to think about” (227). Her invocation of the Grauer Geist before her death literalizes this guilt. She becomes both haunted and haunting, a spectral figure consumed by the futility of her choices. That her murderer approaches in silence behind her as she contemplates the past underscores the novel’s point that guilt and death are inseparable companions. Edith acted in her own self-interest, to avoid being labeled a Nazi, but she attempted to justify it to herself by framing her decision through a patriotic lens. This lens the line between loyalty and betrayal, as even her love for the Matheson family, and the love Anna still feels for Edith, cannot soften the impact of her collaboration. In Edith, Sager crystallizes the novel’s gray moral landscape, a character who is both victim and perpetrator, tragic in her attachments yet culpable in her choices.

Anna continues to wrestle with Guilt, Redemption, and the Weight of the Past. When Dante asks her if she truly thought everyone would confess, Anna realizes that she did hold that desire within her: “Yes, Anna had indeed hoped for that, and still plans to get at least some of them to admit what they’d done—and why. […] Even though learning the reasons for their betrayal won’t bring her family back, Anna suspects it might bring some closure” (201). Anna wants to close the painful chapter of her family’s loss, and she requires the “closure” of hearing the group confess to their roles in her pain. Anna cannot let go of the past until she fully understands it and knows that the people who hurt her have faced their guilt and confessed to it. Her hope for confession highlights the novel’s meditation on narrative itself. Anna believes that the spoken acknowledgment of guilt has transformative power, as if words might reconstruct the broken past. Yet this belief leaves her vulnerable to further disappointment, since the conspirators cling to denial and silence.

The Phoenix itself becomes a metaphor for Anna’s inner journey. As the train moves through snow and darkness, it mirrors Anna’s unstoppable movement toward a reckoning she both craves and fears. She cannot remain aboard this train of grief forever, but each compartment forces her to confront another layer of loss, guilt, or temptation toward violence. The claustrophobic setting strips away illusions, leaving only her raw emotions: love for the family she’s lost, grief for the betrayals she uncovers, and rage at the conspirators. In this sense, the train is less a luxury vehicle than a moving crucible, carrying Anna, Reggie, and Seamus—each of whom has been scarred by the same wartime explosion—through parallel journeys of unresolved mourning. Violence pulses beneath the surface of the ride, whether in Herb’s sudden aggression, Edith’s rationalizations of Nazi sympathy, or Anna’s suppressed fantasies of killing. The Phoenix becomes a moving space where past and present collide and where Anna must decide whether her trajectory ends in vengeance, justice, or collapse.

Edith’s murder intensifies Anna’s internal conflict. When Anna confronts Edith’s corpse, she discovers that hatred is not her dominant emotion but grief, as the positive memories overwhelm her. This inability to sustain pure hatred shows that Anna’s desire for revenge is always undercut by her humanity, which remembers love even in betrayal. Reggie’s revelation that Edith was smothered, not strangled, further complicates this dynamic. Anna is nearly framed for a crime she did not commit, a cruel irony given that she has tried so hard to restrain her violent impulses. The smear of lipstick on the cushion becomes a grotesque inversion of intimacy, turning a mark of femininity into evidence of death.

Anna’s obsession with the past also informs how she views her future. Anna worries that Edith’s comment is correct, that her family would weep at who she’s become. She thinks that “instead of shutting herself away with Aunt Retta, they would have wanted her to meet someone, fall in love, get married. More than anything, she thinks they’d all want her to be happy” (212). Anna has put her life on hold since her family’s deaths to grieve and seek justice. Her existence has been entirely devoted to seeking retribution for her loss, and now she’s uncertain what a future not fixated on vengeance could offer her. The snowstorm outside the Phoenix amplifies this moment of reflection. While Anna imagines the warmth of a life unlived, she is literally encased in ice, barreling through darkness. The weather externalizes her fear that she may never thaw from the frozen state of grief and retribution.

At the same time, Herb’s panic and attempted assault on Anna highlight the corrosive effects of guilt and fear. His desperate comparison of the train to a coffin reveals how the Phoenix, once a symbol of luxury and progress, has become for the conspirators a rolling tomb, sealing them with the consequences of their own crimes. Herb’s knife at Anna’s throat represents the inversion of power: Even those who once served Kenneth’s scheme now lash out in violence, suggesting that guilt does not produce repentance but further corruption.