- Prejean thought it would be best to avoid the Harveys, since they were mad at her, but one day, the Harveys attend a seminar on the death penalty she's giving.
- Elizabeth comes up to Prejean and asks her why she hasn't visited.
- So Prejean visits, bringing apple pie.
- It never hurts to bring apple pie.
- The Harveys have had a bad time with the criminal justice system. The police aren't really interested in victims.
- The Harveys have also been abandoned by their friends. Elizabeth thinks this is because people are made uncomfortable and afraid when a violent death happens.
- Harvey cries when Prejean mentions that Robert had hoped his death would give the Harveys some peace. It hasn't—even though Vernon is still a fervent supporter of the death penalty.
- At an anti-death-penalty rally, Elizabeth takes the microphone and asks people to support funds for victims' assistance.
- Prejean sees the Harveys at another execution, and they ask her to come to a Parents of Murdered Children meeting. She does, and it's extremely painful, as you'd imagine.
- Prejean decides that she needs to work to help victims' families. She finds that the Harveys' experience of being let down by the criminal justice system—and by friends—is typical.
- Prejean helps establish a victims' assistance group in New Orleans.
- In 1989, Vernon has open-heart surgery; Prejean goes to visit him. He's in a lot of pain. They banter back and forth about the death penalty.
- We bounce over to the first meeting of Survive, the victims' assistance group. Here, families tell horrible stories of how their loved ones were killed.
- Many of the people at the meeting are black and poor, and the police care little about the deaths in their families. They provide almost no information to the family members and often even arrest them for the crimes if they can.
- And then we get to Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of the boy Pat killed.
- Prejean says she had some contact with him in the years after Pat's death. Then, later, she went with Lloyd to church, and they became closer.
- Lloyd tells Prejean that he spoke for execution at the Pardon Board in part for the Bourque family. But he'd been upset and uncertain. Now, he says, he prays for the Sonniers.
- Lloyd also tells Prejean that he has forgiven Pat and Eddie, though it was hard to do. Forgiveness is hard, especially when he remembers David, and thinks how he might have grown had he not been murdered.
- And on that weeper, the book ends.
- There is a little postscript, though, saying that the death penalty has been expanded to further states since the book was published in 1994 (though between that time and now, it's actually been banned in a number of states).