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 41-49Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary
With the revelation in court of his Parkinson’s, Walk accepts his reassignment. Martha challenges his decision to lie under oath and manufacture evidence to acquit Vincent. Martha dismisses his heroism: “You’ve lived the past thirty years for someone else” (321).
Duchess heads back to Montana. She hitchhikes—an old couple picks her up. Desperate for money, she breaks into their hotel room through the window and steals their money. The old woman wakes up while Duchess is rifling through her purse. She says nothing. Duchess exits—she had let them know “the world was not good” (326).
Chapter 42 Summary
Walk drives to Montana to pick up Duchess and Robin. He is determined to keep them safe.
Thomas, home alone, is watching television when suddenly the power goes out. Then he hears a window break downstairs and is terrified. A man calls to him—tell me what I want to know, and I will leave, he growls. Where is Duchess Radley? Thomas knows this is the man in Escalade looking for the girl he loves. Suddenly a gunshot shatters the silence and Walk storms into the home. He chases Darke out the door and into the woods. Walk shoots and clips Darke in the shoulder. Walk demands to know what happened. Darke says he didn’t want to kill Hal—the old man pulled a gun on him before he could say anything. He doesn’t want to hurt Duchess—he just needs the videotape to save his business. He says he only asked Star to help him get Vincent to sell. He wants Walk to shoot him—that way, his insurance would go to his daughter: “Please just fucking shoot me” (333). Walk refuses. Darke raises his gun and aims at the sheriff. Walk takes him out with one shot.
Chapter 43 Summary
Duchess makes her way to California. She is running out of money and food until a trucker offers her a ride. She passes through town after town, a girl on her way to right a lifetime of wrongs” (339)
Chapter 44 Summary
In the aftermath of Darke’s shooting, Walk resigns his office and surrenders his badge. His certainty that Darke shot Star is upended when the ballistics report confirms the fingerprints on the gun Vincent hid in the tree are a child’s prints. Walk is stunned. Robin shot his mother? He goes to Vincent, who confirms he was willing to take the fall for Robin. Darke came into the house that night and threatened Star. Robin was hiding in a closet, found Star’s gun, and came out to protect his mom. He missed. Vincent was there—he had seen Darke’s car in the driveway and was worried. Before Robin shot, Vincent had agreed to sell his house to Darke just to protect Star and her kids. Vincent was ready to take responsibility for the murder—he had been haunted by guilt since Sissy’s death. After the shooting, Darke told Vincent to take the gun in case he needed evidence. Vincent challenges Walk for his perjury in court: “You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved” (344).
Chapter 45 Summary
Duchess heads into town. She heads to the cemetery where her mother is buried. She finds Vincent there. He is calm: “I was waiting for you” (350). Slowly Duchess pulls out the gun. She says she is done talking, but as she levels her Smith & Wesson at the man she believes destroyed her family, Vincent calmly tells her she does not have to do this: “I came here to say goodbye. This isn’t on you” (351). He throws himself off the cliff into the ocean.
Chapter 46 Summary
In the days after Vincent’s suicide, Walk, despite leaving the police force, still wants closure. On a hunch, after he talks with Star’s counselor in charge of her rehab, Walk buses out to the prison to talk to the warden. He is shocked to learn that because Vincent was such a model prisoner, the warden had allowed him unsupervised conjugal visits with Star. The visits had gone on for years until Vincent finally told Star she needed to get on with her life. Walk realizes that Duchess and Robin are both Vincent’s children.
Chapter 47 Summary
Duchess had returned to the Montana ranch where, with the help of one of Hal’s old loves, she intended to settle. A letter from Walk reveals the truth about Vincent and how he had committed suicide rather than let her kill him and spend her life in prison. In addition, given that Darke was dead, the home Vincent so carefully restored is now hers.
Chapter 48 Summary
Duchess heads to Wyoming to bring back Robin. But when she peers in the window and watches her brother playing with the family dog and his adoptive father helping him with homework, she knows what she must do: “Duchess pressed her palms to the glass and said goodbye to her brother” (366).
Chapter 49 Summary
Back at the ranch now, Duchess stays in her bedroom for a few days. She needs “time to breathe” (367). Hal’s old friend Dolly helps keep an eye on her for now. When she returns to school in the fall, she and Thomas are close friends. She prepares to share her extra credit summer project with the class, a report on her family history. She clears her throat and begins by proudly claiming Vincent as her father.
Chapters 41-49 Analysis
It is time to complete the emotional journeys of both Walk and Duchess. The two have spent most of the novel on the road, their physical traveling suggesting their spiritual journey as well. When Duchess, desperate for money to help in her hitchhiking back to California via Montana (an extraordinary trip, a journey of more than 1,000 miles), robs the old couple who are kind enough to give her a ride and even feed her, she does so with sadness in her heart: “It was her job to remind them, to let them know, the world was not good” (326).
Had the novel ended there, it would indeed be a dark parable of humanity’s willingness to surrender to our basest instincts, resort to violence, break the law without accountability, and do anything to survive, a logic that makes predatory selfishness inevitable. To draw on the novel’s subtle suggestion of Vincent as a Christ-figure and hence capable of saving even this most feral world, it is time for redemption. In these closing chapters, the novel finally affirms Star’s remarks to Duchess just hours before five-year-old Robin gunned her down: “I want to be selfless. […] Selfless acts […] are what make a good person” (42). Ultimately, the novel reveals that the world may not be good, but its people can be.
The death of Darke begins the novel’s movement toward affirmation. He explains to Walk the circumstances of his shooting Hal—how the crusty old man was spoiling to shoot and never gave him a chance to explain why he was there. Shooting him was an act of self-defense. He tells Walk that he means no harm to Duchess. He needs the videotape to keep his hopes for the economic recovery of Cape Haven on track. He sees the only way to maintain his daughter’s care is to sacrifice himself. In compelling Walk to shoot him, Darke accomplishes what he could not do alive: His daughter will be taken care of for as long as she needs it. In a single scene, the novel’s villain suddenly appears heroic, not selfish but self-sacrificing.
It is no less than the outlaw Duchess who next performs an act of selfless love. Armed with multiple weapons, sporting her cowboy hat and boots, and ready to execute the man she believes responsible for her mother's death and the fragmentation of her family, she goes to Wyoming to gather Robin to join her in her quest for justice. As she watches through the window and sees Robin’s adoptive father gently carrying him up to bed, she understands she cannot deprive him of this chance at normalcy and happiness. She must give up the only family she knows. It is a difficult decision: “She was not a girl that cried, but right then tears fell as she allowed the dam to break. She cried for everything she had lost, and everything he had found” (366). She turns from the house and leaves her brother to his newfound happiness: “The world was his” (366).
The showdown in the cemetery between Vincent and Duchess does not read the same for us as it does for the two characters. We know that Vincent is Duchess’ father. We know that Robin, not Vincent, shot Star. We know that Vincent had offered to sell his family home to protect Duchess from Darke’s scheming. Duchess knows none of this. Their showdown along the cliff overlooking the Pacific is set to the hymn “Abide with Me,” playing from the cemetery chapel. “Abide with Me,” the song’s serene plea to God to stay present with us during even the most difficult moment, underscores the sacrifice that Vincent is about to make. He has already suffered for a hit-and-run accident that was not his fault. He killed a man who was paid to get sent to jail and pick a fight with him. He stepped in to take the blame for his son’s actions. And now, knowing that his daughter was about to ruin her life by killing him over a series of misunderstandings, he tells his daughter that it is not her fault. His suicide—laying down his life to spare his daughter’s—marks the novel’s quiet affirmation that the world may be bad, but its people are good.
The novel closes not with a happy ending—that is the stuff of fairy tales. After all, Vincent is dead. Robin faces a harrowing adolescence plagued by dreams of a murder he does not understand he committed. Walk has found his way back to love even as he begins to edge into the first stages of Parkinson’s. And the town of Cape Haven—with its financial entrepreneur now shot dead by a rogue cop—will continue its steady slow slide into the ocean. But as Vincent reassured Walk as he worked to repair his family home after nearly 30 years of neglect, “Everything can be fixed” (78). The novel offers a happily-enough-ever-after, a world where love, self-sacrifice, and compassion happen despite, not because of, the world.
