Henry finds Grace after she disappears on Dom’s birthday, an episode in which a frightening search becomes the setting for her first full disclosure of the guilt she has carried since Dominic Sawyer died. The discovery does not resolve her grief at once. Instead, it brings her back into contact with the memory she has tried to preserve and punish herself with, while allowing Henry Isaac Page to witness the pain she had kept from him.

The birthday and the search

The disappearance begins amid an already chaotic day for Henry. As editor of the Westland Post, he is trying to organize a last-minute issue with the staff and school administrators when two messages change what the day means. His mother tells him that she is at Grace Town’s house and that he should come there. Then a voice message from Martin Sawyer identifies the occasion: it is Dominic’s birthday, the first since he died, and Grace is missing. Martin’s broken, tearful account makes the danger immediate, even before Henry hears the whole message.

At school, Principal Valentine says Grace is unaccounted for and that her family and the police are handling the matter. Henry cannot accept being kept at work. Although he is warned that leaving could cost him the editorship, he runs from the office, with Lola Leung following. He has already concluded that Grace may be dead. The certainty is not based on news from the police; it is the fear that takes hold as soon as he learns she has vanished.

Martin describes the places the family and police intend to check. He and Mary will drive to the lake house, where Grace and Dominic had once considered spending his birthday. Martin will also contact Grace’s friends from East River to search the library where she wrote, the café where she ate breakfast, and a houseboat at the marina. Henry realizes how much of Grace’s life he has never seen. These locations belong to a version of her that existed before their relationship, with Dominic beside her, and their very unfamiliarity sharpens his fear that he never knew her fully.

The search turns into a long interval of waiting. People are assigned places to look, police arrive and ask questions that suggest they suspect suicide, and Henry’s family drives slowly through the suburbs, watching for a teenage girl. After dark, the police tell them to rest and say Grace will turn up one way or another. Henry remains awake, imagining literary, dramatic deaths for her and recognizing how easily he has turned her into a character. The thought of a hidden fishpond breaks through those fantasies: he remembers the underground pool at the Abandoned train station and understands that this is where she may be.

Discovery at the abandoned station

Henry leaves without waking his parents. He takes the car keys, drives into the city, climbs the cast-iron fence, sprains his ankle tumbling off a hedge, picks the lock, and hurries down the spiral staircase. In the dark of the underground pool, Grace is standing waist-deep in the still water. She is alive. The relief is so forceful that Henry’s legs nearly give way.

The scene is both stark and ceremonial. Moonlight is the only light; tears mark Grace’s face, and her breath forms pale plumes in the cold. A wreath of flowers is woven into her hair, and she wears white like a wedding dress. Henry runs and then wades through the water to reach her. He takes off his coat and puts it around her shoulders because she is shaking, then tries to persuade her to leave the water. Grace does not move at first. When her grief finally breaks through, she collapses against him, sobbing violently. Henry holds her as she asks why Dominic had to die and why she could not have died instead.

The rescue changes what the search had seemed to mean. Henry and the others had feared that Grace was attempting suicide, and Henry admits through his actions that he had shared that assumption. Grace tells him that she had been placed on suicide watch during the first month after Dominic’s death, while people checked on her so persistently that she could not mourn in peace. She says she was not depressed, either then or now; what she feels is anger. Her distinction challenges the story others have imposed on her, even as the scene shows how intensely she is suffering.

The pool is not a place Henry has guessed at random. Grace had previously described an old refuge where she went to remember how small she was in the scale of the universe. Returning there on Dominic’s birthday links the present crisis to a pattern of confronting sadness through vastness and insignificance. Henry’s earlier understanding of her grief had also been shaped by traces of Dominic that remained in her life: his unwashed clothes, their shared smell, and the bedroom where Henry recognized how completely she seemed to inhabit the memory of him. At the pool, that private, material presence becomes something Grace can address aloud.

What Grace reveals

After Henry reaches her, Grace says she wants to tell him about Dominic because she has been unfair to him and believes he deserves the truth. She begins with their childhood. She was nine when her uncle brought her to Mary’s home; her father was already dead, and her mother had been away for three days, leaving no food in the house. Grace recalls arriving shy and wary of boys, then seeing Dominic jump from a trampoline to invite her to play Mario Kart. He taught her how to play and let her win. Later, they held hands while watching cartoons on a laptop in his tree house. Grace recalls loving Dominic and his family, and deciding by the end of that first day that she would marry him.

Her account establishes that their bond began not as a brief romance but as a source of belonging in a childhood marked by neglect and instability. Dominic’s family offered a form of care Grace had not known to expect. The history helps explain why his death left more than the absence of a boyfriend: in her telling, she had lost the first people who made her feel loved and safe.

Grace then discloses the guilt she has never told anyone. She was in hospital when Dominic’s funeral took place, and although the family waited as long as possible, she was too ill to attend. They asked her to write something that could be read as a eulogy, since she was known as a writer, but she avoided doing it. She says she has not written since and does not think she can write again until she makes herself do so. The silence around the eulogy is connected to her belief that she caused the crash: she says she was teasing and distracting Dominic, he told her to stop, and they ended up in the wrong lane. Others call it an accident and describe her guilt as survivor’s guilt, but Grace says that response has kept her from telling them what she remembers.

Her account also revises Henry’s sense of what she wants from life. Grace describes death not as an immediate plan but as the prospect of eventual rest from pain and exhaustion. Henry asks her to stop speaking that way and says they need to get her home. This time, she does not resist. The distinction she draws between anger and depression does not make her grief less severe; it shows why Henry’s fear alone cannot stand in for understanding what she is experiencing.

Releasing Dominic’s keepsakes

On the steps, Grace has a small metal box containing objects from Dominic’s shrine: the anchor necklace she wore when Henry first saw her, a Strokes keychain, and the Ramones shirt she had not been able to wash. She takes Henry’s hand and leads him back into the pool. With her limp barely perceptible in the water, she releases the objects one by one into its depths. Last, she lets the box itself go. Its side is marked DOM GRADE 10, and it sinks among the fish to the debris-covered floor.

The action is a deliberate relinquishing of objects she had preserved, not proof that her grief has ended. Henry wonders whether he is witnessing redemption or absolution, and whether Grace has forgiven herself; the scene offers no assurance that she has. Its force lies in the concrete act of letting the shrine descend, after she has finally named the memory and guilt that gave it such power. The keepsakes had carried Dominic into Grace’s present through their smell and touch; here, she chooses to release them while Henry is beside her.

Grace leaves the station in Henry’s coat and her wet white dress. At his car, she takes off the dress and throws it into the gutter, saying that she had intended to marry Dominic in it and had already said yes. The admission gives the dress a history the scene’s wedding-like appearance had only suggested: it is bound to a future she expected to share with him. She gets into the car trembling, draws her knees to her chest, and rides home without speaking. The release of the box and the disposal of the dress are distinct gestures: one relinquishes the objects of Dominic’s shrine, while the other casts away a garment attached to the marriage she had imagined.

Aftermath and significance

The encounter begins Grace’s recovery without turning it into a sudden cure. In the following weeks, Henry finds that she is no longer the first thought that greets him every morning; his attachment remains, but its intensity begins to ease, and he realizes he will survive the separation. Grace, too, changes gradually. After Christmas, her limp becomes less noticeable and then disappears, she stops using her cane, and she begins driving to school. Sometimes she wears Dominic’s clothing, but mostly she wears her own. The continuing presence of a cap, necklace, or jacket shows that recovery does not require her to erase him; the change is that his belongings no longer define everything she wears.

Henry and Grace eventually remove each other from their social-media accounts and separate the practical ties that remain between them. Their lives become distinct again, though Henry continues to love her and understands that she still loves Dominic. The birthday disappearance therefore functions as both a crisis and a turning point: Henry finds Grace alive, but the more lasting discovery is the truth she has withheld about the crash, her silence, and the grief beneath her self-punishment. Her release of the keepsakes opens a possibility of movement, while the slow return of her mobility and ordinary routines shows that moving forward will take time.