The perspective shifts. Abby's section begins, and the game does the thing it has been preparing for — it places the player inside the person Ellie has been hunting, asks for empathy for someone who committed an act that seemed unforgivable, and does so not by excusing the act but by providing the context that the first half deliberately withheld. Love and hate in the same register, the same pitch, the same desperate intensity.

The screaming is not literal. It is the volume at which both emotions operate when everything that mediates them — reason, distance, time — has been stripped away by grief. Abby loved her father. Ellie loved Joel. The love and the hate it generated are not opposites. They are the same force pointed in different directions, and distinguishing them requires exactly the quiet that neither character currently has.