He's had some time to think while he's been trapped here -- well, he's been able to do little else -- and the conclusion he's come to is that he's failed. It doesn't matter at what. At everything, everything he's ever tried to do, large or small, good or bad.

That Darla reacts to him with sympathy, rather than in the angry and vindictive way he'd told himself she would, is sort of the cherry on the cake of the things he's gotten wrong.

The pencil quivers and falls again, rolling down into the fold between the book's pages.