Kate drinks the whole bottle

Kate sits without moving, seeing the blond boy's shocked face and his dark brother laughing in the doorway. Joe, pushing for his break, invents a stranger who mentioned Faye — and gives himself away by knowing the name. Kate offers him ten thousand dollars, watches him lick his lips, and tells him to go and figure it out. Then she writes to Ralph suggesting the sheriff check Joe Valery's fingerprints. Alone, she remembers being a small girl reading Alice in Wonderland, and the bottle of sugar water labelled "Drink me" she carried against the forest of her enemies — how she could shrink to a dot under a leaf, and how drinking the whole bottle would mean she had never been at all. She tells the girls she will sleep the clock around, writes a two-line will leaving everything to Aron, does her hair and face and nails, and in the grey room swallows the capsule with cold tea. Joe strips her chain in the morning, pockets the will and the photographs, runs from the sheriff's man, and is shot dead in an alley.

The book gives Kate her childhood at the very end, and it turns out to be the only tenderness she ever had: a book, an imaginary friend, and a way of not existing. She wins her last skirmish with Joe and posts the letter that kills him, so what finishes her is not defeat but the one sentence she cannot answer. The prose follows the capsule down to "and she had never been".