The news article in Chapter 22 details the death of Abby Dempsey, Jessica Campbell’s best friend, whom Nick inadvertently killed the day of the shooting, as she sold donuts for the student council fundraiser.

Valerie’s mother, stuck at work, leaves Valerie to take the bus, a fate Valerie considers worse than walking to her father’s office for a ride home. Oddly, she reflects on how little she knows of her father’s office, though she understands his work and the time away from home symbolize “his escape from the family” (259).

When she arrives, Valerie remembers a company/family event when her father’s secretary laughed too hard at her dad’s jokes. When he comes out of the office, unaware of Valerie’s presence, his manner is too familiar with the secretary, revealing their affair. In an instant, seeing the truth so plainly, Valerie realizes, “Suddenly I understood why I had clung to Nick like a life preserver—he not only understood crappy families, he understood crappy families would never be good again” (262). Valerie runs from the office back to school. 

After the confrontation in her father’s office, Valerie returns to school, telling her mother she will wait there. Reflecting on her father’s affair, she expresses her pain through drawing, sketching a new baby for her father’s new life with his mistress, Briley, and a teardrop for her mother to mourn the loss of her old family.