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53 pages 1 hour read

Chris Whitaker

We Begin at the End

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Chapters 21-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary

Walk and Martha rekindle their relationship as they prepare for Vincent’s trial. They are facing an uphill battle, given the neighbor who will testify that Vincent and Darke argued before the shooting. Walk is certain Darke is responsible and plows through tax returns and bank statements to see what Darke was into.

At the ranch, Robin begs Duchess not to ruin everything with her temper. A friend of Hal’s tells Duchess that, despite what Star told them, Hal made the long drive to Cape Haven every year for Duchess’ birthday, but Star stopped him from seeing his grandkids. Duchess sees Hal differently, as she recognizes his “plaintive ask of redemption” (179). They talk briefly—Duchess assures Hal that Darke will come for her, and Hal assures her he will stop him.

Chapter 22 Summary

Walk interviews a stripper from Darke’s bar. She tells him Darke is not violent. She admits there were always lowlife types collecting money, and Darke can have a short fuse, but he looked after the strippers. Walk drives to Darke’s estate. Darke assures the sheriff that his loyalty blinds him to his high school buddy: “You don’t want to see the man he is, only the boy he was” (186). Walk notices Darke has packed a small suitcase. As soon as Walk gets home, he calls Montana.

Chapter 23 Summary

Duchess settles into a routine: “There was a gradualism to Montana days, fall sweeping them along with leaves a thousand kinds of brown” (189). Duchess still worries about Darke. Thomas bikes out to the ranch one Sunday to ask Duchess to attend the school’s winter formal with him. She cuts him off. I have a gangster looking for me, she says, and you are a “weakling asshole” (193).

Chapter 24 Summary

At a Copper Falls parade, the older brother of the boy Duchess threatened corners her and demands she apologize to him: “Shut the fuck up, fat boy” (197) is Duchess’ response. As the kid clenches his fist, Thomas jumps in to defend Duchess. The boy takes a single punch that knocks Thomas out. As she helps Thomas to his feet, Duchess sees Darke’s Escalade turn onto Main Street.

Walk, investigating Darke’s labyrinthine financial statements, determines that he planned to purchase all the properties along the cliffs overlooking the coast and that the only thing stopping his development scheme, worth more than $5 million, was Vincent’s refusal to sell his family home.

Chapter 25 Summary

On the night of the parade, Duchess cannot sleep, and she and Hal talk about Vincent. Hal is certain Vincent is a danger. He cannot forget or forgive Vincent for killing his daughter: “She was small and beautiful and perfect” (206). Hal confides in Duchess that when Vincent was about to be paroled early, Hal arranged for a man he knew to get arrested and sent to the same prison. The man picked a fight with Vincent, but in the ensuing fight, Vincent killed him. The state added 20 years to Vincent’s sentence. When he told Star, Star never spoke to him again and kept him from his grandkids.

Meanwhile, Walk is certain he has a motive—Darke killed Star and pinned the blame on Vincent to clear the way for his development plan. He talks with Martha, but without the gun, it is all speculation. Martha brings up the baby they conceived that her father made her abort. Walk had never confronted her: “I just wanted you all to be happy” (210). They hold hands.

Chapter 26 Summary

Winter sets into Montana. On the first day of December, Thomas brings a bouquet of bluebells and asks Duchess to go to the winter formal with her. She agrees but warns him she will not dance. Hal takes Duchess to a dress shop the next day. She picks out a pretty yellow dress and a Stetson cowboy hat.

Walk meets the prison warden at a burger joint. The warden assures Walk that Vincent was a model prisoner. He kept to himself, ate little, and seldom watched television. Vincent cut himself with a knife the warden secreted to him as a favor. He tells Walk, “No one knows Vincent” (215).

Chapter 27 Summary

It is the night of the winter formal. Duchess cringes when she sees the bow tie and dinner suit complete with a cape that Thomas wears. However, when the music starts, she impulsively grabs Thomas by his bad hand, and the two dance. Duchess warns him, “Keep your hands away from my ass” (219).

Thomas’ mother drives Duchess home after the dance. Because of snow drifts, Duchess gets out along the main road and tells Mrs. Noble she can walk to the ranch house. As she approaches the house, she stops cold when she sees footprints in the snow. She runs to the ranch house to find Hal on the porch, shot. She calls 911. Before he dies, Hal says, “You make me proud” (224). Duchess feels the familiar “hot twisting anger” (224).

Chapter 28 Summary

Walk is stunned by the news of Hal’s death: “If Walk was broken before, what happened in Montana scattered the pieces so far and wide he gave up all hope of ever being whole again” (228). He drives to Montana for the funeral. Duchess, wearing the yellow dress, tells him Hal’s creditors will take the ranch. Meanwhile, she and Robin will be placed in foster care. Walk assures the guilt-ridden Duchess that none of this was her fault.

Chapter 29 Summary

The caseworker drives Robin and Duchess to meet the Price family, who have agreed to take them in. Robin struggles with forgiving his sister for treating their grandfather so harshly for so long. That night, Duchess sneaks down to the Prices’ study and gets on the computer for news about Vincent’s upcoming trial until one of the Price kids catches her.

Chapter 30 Summary

Walk is frustrated—he hasn’t got grounds for a search warrant for Darke’s mansion to try to find the gun. Martha stops by his office and suggests that Walk go after Darke’s finances. Walk approaches a woman who worked at the bank and whose home Darke had already acquired despite her willingness to sleep with him. The woman claims Darke was with her the night Star was shot, but Walk is certain she is lying. Walk knows that, even if she admitted the lie, that would not be enough.

Chapters 21-30 Analysis

In these chapters, the novel turns toward the possibility of redemption. Cape Haven is full of emotionally devastated people. The plot has introduced multiple murders, long-simmering grudges and anger, spiritual alienation, depthless loneliness, displacement from home, disconnection from the loving and forgiving God, and many hard and painful secrets. The church is full, but the people are empty.

When Duchess first glimpses how entirely she has misjudged her grandfather, after learning he tried for years to see her and Robin and her mother stopped him, Duchess sees Hal differently. It is the first time in the novel that Duchess the Outlaw has pivoted away from that persona of cool confidence and certainty. Suddenly she sees her grandfather as he is, struggling to express his emotions and bond with his only granddaughter. He embodies, for Duchess, “the lure of second chance, the plaintive ask of redemption” (179).

The lure of the second chance—that phrase suggests Walk’s own journey toward redemption. Even as Hal and Duchess begin to find their way each to the other, Martha and Walk slowly edge away from trial preparation to bring to light what neither one wants to talk about. The abortion Martha’s father forced on her stole their great chance at happiness, a family, and the normalcy they lost. Since then, they have dug moats around their hearts, determined to find in their dedication to work what they have lost. Martha, ironically, works in family law, helping shattered families find peace. Walk maintains law and order despite those disturbing moments when he thinks about his best friend from high school serving all that time because of a stupid, blind accident. The hit-and-run upends all of Walk’s professional faith in a world that makes sense, the world of law and order. Cued symbolically to Martha’s hilarious introduction of spicy food to Walk, who likes bland food, the couple reclaims the emotional heat of their teenage love.

But redemption is difficult, costly, and ultimately tragic. There is Hal shot dead by Darke, who appears at this point to be the embodiment of evil. After all, Darke appears to be not only the greedy real estate developer threatening the very economic life of Cape Haven, but he is also the man directly responsible for two murders. There is Duchess who understands now that Copper Falls cannot be her refuge, that such a happy place cannot be hers. Despite the happy night she shares with Thomas at the winter formal, that refuge is summarily shattered the same night. Determined to reclaim her outlaw persona, she taps into that “hot, twisting anger” and decides she must kill Darke herself. She is the avenging angel, the exact opposite of the compassionate energy of redemption. Her decision to exact revenge is the low point in her emotional evolution.

This section ends there, affirming the truth that Darke himself offers Walk during their confrontation over Vincent: no one knows anybody. Redemption does not come through understanding and clarity—it comes only through humility and accepting how little you know. Thus, the section ends in a mix of contradictions.

Each principal character is both certain and dead wrong. Walk is determined to unearth evidence against Darke, certain that he is behind Star’s death when, as we will learn later, it is her own son who shot her. Without that knowledge, Walk appears heroic in these chapters, committed to the classic exercise of police investigation—in just a few chapters, however, he will lie in open court. The Duchess, reclaiming her outlaw persona, is ready to be angry at the world and ready for revenge. Vincent—with his confession made and whatever evidence Walk finds pointing to his guilt—is a killer motivated by the crassest sort of jealousy. Hal, shot dead by Darke, appears to be the heroic saint, the grizzled rogue Christian who dreams big and looms powerful: “I see the earth, I see the curves. I see the clouds that hold the sky. […] The world is nothing, so small I raise a finger and hide it. I am the God I don’t believe in” (179). His death makes him a tragic hero—all before the facts of how he maneuvered to keep Vincent in jail for an additional 20 years. And Darke emerges as the heavy, traveling thousands of miles to terrorize a child and, in the process, murder her grandfather. Duchess, the Outlaw, will right the world.

Everything is clear, and everybody is wrong. Recall the doomed Star, the sensitive singer whose heart and soul were destroyed by the hit-and-run that killed her sister. Star has come to see the world Duchess and Walk must come to accept. Recall her words to Walk shortly before her death, “You think like a kid. Everything is better or worse. Good or bad. None of us are any one thing. We’re just a collection of the best and worst things we did” (67).

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