53 pages • 1 hour read
Chris WhitakerWe Begin at the End
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
With their mother dead, Duchess and Robin are sent to Montana to live with their grandfather, Hal. Walk agrees to drive them because Robin is terrified of flying. The trip is long. Duchess asks about Vincent and his mother’s murder, hoping the state will execute him. When they arrive at Copper Falls, where Hal’s ranch is, Duchess admits she does not like her grandfather. He made no effort to contact them for years.
Hal is cordial when they arrive. Walk assures him that Vincent is under arrest but that he is certain Vincent is innocent. Hal objects, “Vincent King is the cancer of my family” (98). When Walk cautions Hal that Darke is looking for Duchess, Hal assures him she is safe here.
Chapter 12 Summary
Duchess resists her grandfather’s hospitality. She will not even eat. Hal, however, bonds with Robin, who delights in the ranch’s animals.
Meanwhile, Walk returns to Cape Haven. Neighbors have told police there was some sort of argument right before the shots, but they have not located the gun. On slender evidence—Vincent and Darke argued two nights before the shooting—the police charge Vincent with capital murder. Vincent refuses to speak. Walk does not buy the theory that Vincent killed his ex-girlfriend in a jealous rage.
Chapter 13 Summary
At the ranch, Duchess continues her hunger strike. She is belligerent to her grandfather: “You don’t say my name. You don’t fucking say it. You don’t know anything about me or my brother” (109). She takes long walks, eventually making it to the town of Copper Falls, where she meets a “small, skinny black boy” wearing a bow tie named Thomas Noble. Thomas is mesmerized by Duchess. When Duchess asks him what he's staring at, he answers “some kind of angel” (110).
Vincent is back in prison. Walk visits him and tells him he believes he is innocent. Vincent says cryptically, “Guilt is decided long before an act is committed” (116).
When Walk asks whether he has a lawyer, Vincent says he wants their old school friend Martha. Vincent suggests he get a criminal defense attorney—Martha specializes in family law—but Vincent is adamant.
Chapter 14 Summary
It is Sunday, and Hal tells Duchess and Robin they are going to church. Duchess refuses, pointing out that Hal is a “shell of a man who’s made a decent mess of his life, who’s got no friends and no family and no one to give a shit about him when he drops dead” (119). Hal shows Duchess the dress he bought her for church. Defiantly, Duchess takes scissors to the dress, cuts it short, and wears it to church. As she and Robin walk into church, she whispers, “I’m getting cult vibes.” In a moment of unexpected reflection during the service, Duchess thinks about her mother and runs out of the church.
Walk drives to Martha’s office. They have not seen each other in years. He tells her that Vincent wants her to defend him. She turns down the offer: “I’ve spent a long time leaving Cape Haven behind” (126).
Chapter 15 Summary
Walk studies Vincent’s prison record, including the fight in which Vincent hit a man and killed him, resulting in 20 years added to his original sentence. Walk suspects that Darke shot Star, but Vincent refuses to talk and refuses to assist in his own defense. Star’s house had been ransacked; someone was looking for something. But Vincent had already confessed.
At the ranch, Hal introduces both kids to shooting. For the first time since arriving in Montana, Duchess responds positively. She relishes the feel of shooting, even if it is only at tin cans. As it turns out, she is a crackerjack shot. She even bonds with a gray horse. That night she comes into the house for dinner. She also downs two shots of bourbon, promptly throws up, and her grandfather tenderly kisses her forehead and helps her to bed.
Chapter 16 Summary
Walk stops by Star’s house and finds Darke inside, rummaging through stuff with a flashlight. Darke points out he owns the house (Star rented it). He asks Walk if he knows where Star’s kids are because he wants to tell them how much their mother meant to him. Walk refuses to tell him anything.
At the ranch, Hal encourages Duchess to practice shooting and even offers to teach her how to drive his old truck. Duchess tries not to think about Vincent or Darke, but she knows “they would appear again” (144).
Chapter 17 Summary
Duchess and Robin both agree to start school in Copper Falls. Duchess wants to carry a gun, but Hal points out no one knows who they are. Duchess assures Robin she will be near. Thomas reintroduces himself to Duchess, and she notices he has a withered arm.
Because Vincent refuses to mount a defense without Martha as his lawyer, Walk returns to her office to plead with her. This time he offers to buy her dinner. Reluctantly, over dinner, Martha agrees to represent Vincent but just at his arraignment.
Chapter 18 Summary
The courtroom is packed. With Martha by his side and Walk in the gallery, Vincent says in a clear voice, “Not guilty” (153). Walk goes home with Martha to begin outlining a defense. Martha says flat out the case is unwinnable given Vincent’s confession. She tells Walk, “Vincent King wants to die” (154). Walk tries to focus, but he is feeling his Parkinson’s medication. He struggles not to get sick.
Chapter 19 Summary
At lunch, Thomas joins Duchess, who eats by herself under a tree. Thomas struggles to make small talk and hints that the two could go to a movie or maybe ice skating. But Duchess is watching through a fence at the kindergarten class and a boy picking on Robin and taking his lunch. She hops the fence, tracks down the kid, and threatens him: “You touch my brother again and I’ll behead you” (159).
The principal calls Hal to take Duchess home for the rest of the day. Hal cautions his granddaughter that she has to stop taking on the world. Look around you, he says, enjoy the beauty of the Montana mountains, but Duchess says the colors only remind her of her mother’s beaten corpse: “Fuck you, Hal. Fuck Montana” (162)
Chapter 20 Summary
Walk talks to Star’s neighbors, who believe Vincent killed Star because he was jealous of Darke. One neighbor tells Walk he’s got Darke figured wrong, that he is a good man who just looks intimidating. The same neighbor tells Walk not to spend too much time tracking down Star’s killer—they already had him.
Chapters 11-20 Analysis
These chapters emerge as a tale of two cities and two evolving relationships. In this, although the plot is driven by Sheriff Walk’s determination to find evidence to exonerate Vincent of Star’s shooting, the novel begins to evolve into less a police procedural and more a story of men and women whose lives have been destroyed by misfortune and bad luck and who struggle now to exorcise those ghosts as the only sure way to move forward. But that movement is not easy.
In this part, the novel opens up to a new place, a new space. After their mother is murdered, Duchess and her brother are dispatched to the spacious wilds of Copper Fall, Montana. Even Duchess, who fights being sent to her grandfather’s ranch, admits the ranch is stunning and the Montana mountains breathtaking. There Duchess and her estranged grandfather commence the difficult work of rebooting their relationship, destroyed by misunderstandings and grudges.
With the sweeping vistas and magnificent sunsets, Montana symbolizes everything the dark and claustrophobic Cape Haven, perched precariously on a cliff and ready any day to slide in the ocean, is not. Yet, for all its generous space (Hal’s ranch is one of the biggest in the state), Copper Falls is not what Duchess and Robin need, now fleeing from Darke. They need a space big enough to get lost in, where they can lose their identity and be alone. Dolly, an ex-girlfriend of Hal’s who comes to be Duchess’ surrogate mother, tenderly tells Duchess, the lonely outlaw, exactly what she needs to learn—that she is not “alone in the world” (123). The bratty and disrespectful Duchess spits back, “I know I’m not alone. I got my brother. And I don’t need anyone else. Not Hal, not you, and not God” (123). But she is still a child and will learn before she leaves Copper Falls how wrong she is on all three counts.
Over the first several weeks, Duchess taps into an important irony. Yes, Montana is big and spacious and perfect for isolating yourself, but as she begins to respond to her grandfather’s horses, become friends with the gawky Thomas, and is introduced to the empowering rush of firing a gun and the thrill of learning to drive her grandfather’s pick-up truck, Duchess begins to understand Montana, for all its spacious reach, is an intimate space with people willing to bond and show her she does not need to be alone. She begins to move emotionally toward her grandfather—she will find out later how much he tried to see his grandkids over the years. The night she drinks too much, her grandfather tenderly and without judgment takes her to bed and kisses her gently on her forehead. It is as if, for this interlude, we can forget Star’s murder and pretend that Duchess is finally safe and free here.
However, the shuttling within each chapter between Montana and Cape Haven reminds us that such a sanctuary is, at best, a dream, at worst, a delusion. If Montana promises the clean, bracing feeling of open spaces, Cape Haven is a dark and claustrophobic space: “If houses had soul,” Walk thinks, Cape Haven’s “was black as a December night” (137). In Cape Haven, Walk begins to probe into the shadowy darkness of Darke’s underworld operations. Certain that Vincent is innocent, Walk dutifully gathers evidence about Darke’s finances and his whereabouts on the nights leading up to Star’s shooting. The reader, at least in the first read, assumes we are on the way to a conventional murder mystery in which an innocent man will be exonerated through diligent police work.
That, however, is skewed by Vincent’s inexplicable demand that their old high school friend Martha be his attorney despite her complete lack of expertise in murder trials. But the motive for that demand is clear only after the first reading (Vincent believes nothing is beyond repair and hopes bringing his two friends together for the trial might rekindle their love). For now, the request seems part of Vincent’s determination to have the court execute him—he hires ineffective counsel.
Thus, as Walk and Martha begin to work the evidence to mount a defense, what defines these chapters is not so much the police procedural as the reignition of Walk’s love for Martha. As her name indicates, Martha May or May not agree ultimately to work for Vincent. At first, she is unapproachable and uninterested in returning to Cape Haven. She declines the offer to work on the case not just because she believes, as everyone else in Cape Haven believes, that Vincent is guilty. Rather she tells Walk she has put Cape Haven in the past. In ways that parallel Duchess and Hal, Walk and Martha begin their relationship far apart from each other, neither willing to talk about the obvious, the abortion of their baby and their separation of nearly 30 years. Neither ever married. Neither ever had children. Neither ever fell entirely out of love. As Vincent, the ever-wise, tells Walk, “You only fall in love once and mean it” (122).
Cape Haven, then, is tight and narrow and yet teeming with the lost and the lonely, while Montana is wide and spacious and yet curiously intimate. That is the sort of contradictory world that both Duchess and Walk will come to grasp.
