No way out of this but through

“No way out of this but through” is Big’s advice to Lennie Walker and Toby Shaw as they confront life after Bailey Walker’s death. Recalled during a summer storm, the phrase names the book’s difficult distinction between escaping grief and living within it: the loss does not simply end, but neither does it prevent every movement toward other people, music, or the future.

The Advice in the Storm

Lennie remembers Big’s words while standing at her bedroom window as rain strikes the roof. Because summer storms are rare, the rain itself feels like an event; she reaches her hands out into it, letting the water slip through her fingers. The gesture makes the advice physical. There is no route around what has happened, and no assurance that the way forward will be clear, but the only available passage is through the experience itself.

The scene does not present this counsel as a neat solution. When Lennie sees Joe Fontaine running through the downpour, she feels immediately uplifted and calls him her life raft. That sudden relief exists alongside the storm and the remembered words, not in place of them. The phrase allows movement toward comfort without suggesting that comfort cancels grief.

Grief’s Disordered Middle

The family’s first summer without Bailey is marked by different, sometimes opposing responses. Gram follows Lennie with a full teapot, hoping to recover their former late-afternoon ritual of tea and conversation; Lennie avoids talking, while Gram’s long showers conceal tears that the others still hear. The household is not moving through grief in unison. Its members circle one another, each struggling with loss in a different way.

Lennie’s own grief also unsettles her understanding of herself. She describes compulsively imagining kisses, including one person she believes she promised Bailey she would never kiss again. The contradiction between desire, guilt, and loyalty makes mourning feel less like a straight progression than a condition that can surface in unexpected forms. The phrase’s insistence on going through grief does not make these impulses orderly or easy to explain.

Change Without Consolation

Lying on the forest floor, Lennie imagines the mild, protected happiness she might have had if Bailey were still alive. She recognizes that she now feels more exposed and intensely alive, wants to make music, and believes Joe might not have noticed her before this change. At the same time, she is troubled by the thought that anything good could emerge from Bailey’s death. The reflection does not turn loss into a benefit: Lennie fears the cost of her changed self even as she acknowledges that Bailey had urged her to live more openly.

Other moments show recovery taking practical, imperfect forms. After practicing Cavallini’s Adagio and Tarantella for two hours, Lennie describes the music as turning air into colors and considers returning to summer band practice. She also makes plans to meet Sarah, who greets her with anger as well as exuberant affection after their estrangement. Music and friendship offer renewed contact with life, but neither is presented as proof that mourning is finished.

Carrying Loss Forward

Later, Lennie runs from school into the woods after challenging a fellow clarinetist for first chair. The future she is moving toward is inseparable from the knowledge that Bailey has no future of her own. Lennie understands that she will grieve her sister repeatedly throughout her life: grief will not disappear but become part of her, accompanying her step for step. Her conclusion is not that the loss can be mastered, but that she can continue to love Bailey and the world at once.

That distinction shapes Lennie’s first visit to Bailey’s grave. After running through alternating patches of sunlight and shade, she feels the fabric of death that has clung to her for months begin to loosen. At the small hilltop cemetery, she sits beside the stone, rests her head against it, and wraps her arms around it. The grave was chosen for its position by the river, whose falls Bailey could hear and whose surroundings Lennie had wanted her to see and smell. Even in a moment of private happiness and release, Lennie comes to Bailey’s grave and touches her name. Going through grief means neither leaving Bailey behind nor remaining unchanged; it means carrying love and loss together into the next day.