Four months after Eddie’s condition worsens, Daphne’s mother finds Lucas dead in the backyard after his usual morning walk around the property. When Daphne tells Eddie, he calls it “a nice death,” and Daphne privately agrees, thinking Lucas likely died quickly after a long life and without the drawn-out decline everyone had feared. Daphne and Leda cancel their obligations and travel to Winchester to support their mother and Lucas’s sons, even though Daphne thinks of herself and Leda as largely ceremonial stepdaughters in the practical aftermath.

On the train, Daphne reflects on the uneven ways family attachments formed around their various fathers and stepfathers. She remembers that she, not Leda, became close to Buddy at the end, just as chance led her, not Leda, back into Eddie’s life at the Met. Lucas had felt more like a father to Leda than to Daphne, and these memories lead into a conversation in which Leda argues that their childhood did not destroy them because they were loved enough but not made the center of their parents’ identities. Daphne begins to reconsider her old view of neglect, seeing that their parents’ distance may also have made them capable and self-reliant.

When Daphne and Leda arrive, they realize neither of them clearly told the family they were coming, but Christopher and Matthew greet them warmly. In the brief interval before the house fills up, the four siblings share affectionate memories of Lucas and talk frankly about what his death may free their mother to do next. Christopher’s wife, Paula, and the children join them, and the family explains that Abigail has spent the morning arguing with the company that makes the mushroom-and-hemp casket Lucas wanted; despite his investment in the company, he is not guaranteed one.

Daphne slips outside to the backyard where Lucas died and thinks about Lucas and Buddy together, measuring Lucas’s long life against Buddy’s early death. Though she resists magical thinking, Daphne silently asks both dead men to help her keep Eddie a little longer. Her mother then comes outside with Daphne’s jacket, assuming Daphne is mourning Lucas, and admits that almost no one seems truly sorry he is dead. Abigail also worries that her own children may one day greet her death with the same practical relief, but Daphne embraces her and insists that Abigail is different, promising that all four children would grieve deeply. The chapter ends with mother and daughter standing together in the cold until Leda calls them back inside.