Back in the present, Daphne and Leda sit in Leda’s apartment and talk about the 1980 car crash now that Daphne has finally remembered it in full. Leda insists that nine-year-old Daphne saved Eddie’s life, while Daphne minimizes what she did and explains that she had buried the memory for decades. Their mother, Abigail, wakes and joins them, but she immediately resists any discussion of the accident, showing that the subject still feels threatening to her even as the others begin to revisit it.

The family gathers for lunch at Eddie’s Chelsea apartment during a relatively good stretch in his leukemia treatment. Eddie warmly welcomes Abigail, and the reunion quickly turns flirtatious and nostalgic as he shows her his apartment and the books he edited. Abigail admires his publishing career and mourns the professional life she gave up after remarriage, while Daphne watches both of them with a mix of distance and sympathy.

At the table, Leda brings up the crash again and pushes Daphne’s childhood bravery into the open. Abigail objects because she does not want a happy day overtaken by old pain, but Eddie asks Daphne to tell the part of the story he never knew: what happened after she left the wrecked car alone in the snow. Daphne describes climbing off the overturned station wagon, using Eddie’s tie to mark her way, wandering through the white field, briefly circling back to the same place, then finally finding the road and a yellow house where Frank and his family took her in and called for help. The rescue crews return with her, cut Eddie from the car, and reunite them in the ambulance, making the meal an occasion not just for memory but for a new family understanding of what Daphne endured and accomplished.

After lunch, Leda and Steve leave, but Abigail wants to go to the Met with Eddie, Daphne, and Jonathan. At the museum, Eddie grows tired and sends Abigail off with Jonathan so he and Daphne can sit together on a bench. Their quiet conversation turns from the accident to childhood imagination, mortality, and art, and Eddie proposes that Daphne write their story down. He frames writing as a kind of immortality: in a book, he says, he would not have to die, and their shared past could remain suspended in meaning.

The chapter ends with a brief return to January 1980 inside the ambulance. Eddie makes sure Daphne rides with him, jokes with the attendants, promises they will thank Frank, and proudly tells the crew that Daphne rescued them both. As the ambulance skids on the icy road, Daphne and Eddie hold hands, and Daphne feels both the terror of what nearly happened and the intensity of the bond formed between them in the wreck and its aftermath.