The farewell of Hector and Andromache is the scene of Book VI. Hector returns to Troy at the request of his brother Helenus, to have the women pray to Athena, who "shook her head in refusal," and he looks for his wife at home. She had already run to the wall, terrified, with the nurse and the little son, and he finds her by the Scaean Gates.
Andromache weeps and asks him to stay: "Madman, your own daring will ruin you; you have no pity for your little son, nor for me, the unfortunate, who will soon be a widow." She reminds him that Achilles killed her father and brothers, and she says to Hector: "you are for me father, reverend mother, and brother, and you are my young husband." She advises him to station the army where the wall is weakest.
Hector answers that he feels all of this too, but "I am deeply ashamed before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing robes," and he knows the city will fall: "the day will come when sacred Ilion will be destroyed." What hurts him most is imagining Andromache carried off by some Achaean. The boy is frightened by the plume on the helmet; the parents laugh, Hector takes off the helmet, kisses his son, and prays that he will be "far better than his father" one day. He gives the boy back to his mother and says that "no one has escaped fate."
Andromache goes home weeping, and the servants mourn Hector while he is still alive. The scene returns in Book XXII, when Andromache, not knowing of her husband's death, prepares hot water for his bath, and in Book XXIV, when she opens her lament before the body. One reading sees in her the choice of honor over family; another, the choice of someone who knows what it costs and makes it anyway.