Patrick “Pat” Price
Quick Facts
- Role: Ailing patriarch of the Price family; former owner of Price & Sons Logging Yard
- Family: Father to Charlie Price and Jeff Price; grandfather to Bel Price and Carter Price; father-in-law to Rachel Price
- First Major Appearance: Chapter 4
- Present State: Living with vascular dementia; wheelchair-bound; requires full-time care
Who They Are
Patrick “Pat” Price—“Grandpa” to his family—is the fading bridge between the Prices’ proud past and their unresolved present. Once the sturdy owner of Price & Sons Logging Yard, he now lives inside the fog of vascular dementia, his remaining memories surfacing in scattered fragments. Those fragments are crucial: they hold shards of the time before Rachel’s disappearance, but they also refuse to cohere, turning Pat into both an imperfect archive and an unintentional gatekeeper of truth.
Pat embodies the story’s central tension between memory and certainty. His illness doesn’t just limit what the family can know—it dramatizes how easily truth erodes when witness and recollection fail. In him, the family’s history survives as a series of flashes: tender, volatile, and incomplete.
Personality & Traits
Even as dementia fractures Pat’s personality, glimpses of the man he was—capable, affectionate, proud—shine through the haze. The present-day volatility and forgetfulness are symptoms, not essence; the flashbacks make clear there was once steadiness and joy.
- Forgetful and disoriented: He misidentifies people and timelines, struggling to place Rachel or the filmmaker, signaled by halting speech and uncertainty (Chapter 4).
- Volatile, not malicious: Sudden aggression surfaces under stress—an outburst that startles rather than defines him (Chapter 4).
- Once deeply affectionate: Family memories recall him reading to Bel and tending to baby Carter, the kinds of mundane intimacies that map a life’s real meaning (Chapter 4).
- Physically frail: Wheelchair-bound, with shaky fingers and a cobweb of dried spit at his mouth, his body narrates decline even before his words do (Chapter 4).
- Residual pride and habit: References to Price & Sons and the rhythms of work suggest an identity once anchored in craft and responsibility.
Character Journey
Pat’s arc isn’t a traditional transformation but a gradual revelation. In the present, he is fixed—bound to the chair, the house, and a mind that skips tracks. The movement happens around him: as Charlie and Jeff care for him, we see the strong father they remember juxtaposed with the man before us. Flashbacks of sledding and grandparenting anchor him in warmth and competence; the trial day and later outbursts expose a family buckling under cumulative grief. Pat’s compromised memory both obstructs the search for answers about Rachel and deepens it—each lucid slip is a clue and a reminder that the archive itself is damaged. What emerges is a portrait of a patriarch transfigured by illness into a living symbol of the Prices’ central loss: they cannot retrieve the past, and yet they cannot move forward without it. The lingering hint of guilt around his wife’s death underscores how much remains unspoken, and how silence calcifies when memory fails.
Key Relationships
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Charlie Price: As primary caregiver, Charlie bears the daily friction of devotion and exhaustion. Pat’s swings—from recognition to confusion to aggression—reopen Charlie’s old wounds from the trial era while also affirming the love that keeps him by his father’s side.
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Jeff Price: Jeff shares the load, but his caregiving registers as a quieter complement to Charlie’s. Their coordinated care for Pat underscores how the brothers’ bond has been shaped—and strained—by crisis and by the uneven burdens of memory.
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Bel Price: Pat’s early bond with Bel—reading sessions, easy affection—gave her a template for familial safety. In the present, his inability to fully recognize her reframes that safety as something she must now extend to him.
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Rachel Price: As daughter-in-law and the center of the family’s unresolved grief, Rachel has become an abstraction in Pat’s mind—“Charlie’s girlfriend”—a telling imprecision. His inability to place her reflects the family’s larger struggle: they know Rachel matters, but they cannot fix her firmly in the story’s facts.
Defining Moments
The story of Pat is told in flashes—bright, painful, contradictory—each moment refracting who he is and what the family has lost.
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Sledding with Charlie (Chapter 4)
- Why it matters: This memory plants Pat firmly in the role of active father and joyful elder, a baseline of warmth against which the present’s fragility is measured.
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The Day of the Verdict (Chapter 4)
- Why it matters: Pat’s absence from the courtroom embodies the family’s fractures—his emotional incapacity mirrors the community’s inability to carry the full weight of the truth.
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Aggressive Outburst during the Documentary (Chapter 4)
- Why it matters: When Pat strikes Charlie and shouts, the scene collapses past and present—the unresolved trauma around Rachel meets the raw unpredictability of dementia. It is not villainy but the human cost of a mind under siege.
Essential Quotes
“You’re the filmmaker from L-L-London.” (Chapter 4)
Pat’s stammering identification is both accurate and unstable. The oscillation between knowing and not knowing foregrounds how his mind catches on surfaces—labels and titles—while deeper context slips away.
“Rachel. Charlie’s girlfriend.” (Chapter 4)
By reducing Rachel to a casual role, Pat inadvertently exposes the family’s central crisis: the most important relationships have been unmoored by time and trauma. His phrasing compresses a marriage, a disappearance, and a trial into a misremembered footnote.
“Stop it!” (Chapter 4)
A flare of fear and frustration more than rage, the command reveals how stimuli—questions, cameras, pressure—overwhelm him. In three syllables, we hear the collision of illness, shame, and the family’s unresolved grief.