Dennis rushes out early one morning to buy the May 1986 issue of Media Now, which publishes an annual list of the 100 most powerful people in media. He returns to their cramped West 84th Street walk-up to tell Jules that Ethan has made the list at number 98. The ranking triggers a prolonged, painful conversation between Jules and Dennis about the widening gap between their lives and those of their closest friends.

The chapter backtracks to cover several years of the two couples’ shared history. Jules and Dennis married earlier that year in a modest ceremony, with Ash giving a warm and memorable toast. Two months later, Ash and Ethan held a lavish 200-guest wedding at the Water Club. Though the Wolfs’ secret continues to bind Jules and Ash together, Jules has told Dennis everything about Goodman. Dennis reacted with shock at the Wolf family’s arrogance, though he has kept the secret faithfully.

Through the mid-to-late 1980s, the couples take vacations together funded by Ethan, traveling to Tanzania, Paris, Madrid, and Venice. Jules watches Ethan gradually grow comfortable with wealth and privilege, a change that quietly disappoints her. On a trip to Venice, Ash slips away to Oslo, ostensibly to research an Ibsen production, but Jules knows she is meeting Goodman in Norway. The narrative provides an update on Goodman: he has survived drug addiction, completed a recovery program in Iceland, and now lives alone above a fish shop with financial support from his family.

Back in New York, Ash’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts receives a strong review in the New York Times and is extended, launching her directing career in earnest. At a celebratory dinner, Dennis unknowingly consumes food contraindicated by his MAO inhibitor. He collapses, vomiting, and is taken by ambulance to the hospital. Lying on the restaurant floor, Jules abandons all her resentment and simply wants back what she and Dennis already have.

The chapter opens with Jonah and his partner, Robert Takahashi, a lawyer at Lambda Legal who has HIV/AIDS, riding home from the hospital at dawn after Dennis’s medical crisis. Dennis has survived a mild stroke caused by a food interaction with his MAO inhibitor. The doctors take him off the medication immediately and predict a full recovery. Ethan insists on handling all the hospital paperwork so Jules can go directly to Dennis.

The chapter then shifts back in time to trace Jonah’s history. After graduating from MIT in 1981, Jonah was recruited by two friendly members of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and, lonely and adrift, joined their commune on a Vermont farm. Jonah’s concerned friends and his mother, Susannah, drove up to retrieve him from the commune. Ethan argued passionately for Jonah to leave, and the group eventually kidnapped him, driving past town without stopping. In a midtown hotel room, a professional deprogrammer spent three days deconstructing Jonah’s indoctrination.

While deprogramming, Jonah noticed Ethan gazing at Jules with unmistakable longing and blurted out that Ethan still loved her. Ethan dismissed the comment curtly. Jonah never raised it again, but never forgot it either.

The chapter also details the beginning of Jonah and Robert’s relationship. Jonah, still working through his traumatic experiences at the hands of Barry Claimes, has always feared sexual overstimulation. Robert’s illness requires him to observe careful, controlled intimacy, which paradoxically suits Jonah well. The two men fall into a loving, serious relationship, and Jonah accompanies Robert to an AIDS protest at the White House in Washington, DC.

As a postscript, it is revealed Susannah Bay, charmed by the commune’s appreciation of her music, stayed behind on the farm. She eventually joined the church permanently and was married in a mass blessing ceremony at Madison Square Garden to Rick McKenna, a stranger from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Aurora Maude Jacobson-Boyd is born to Jules and Dennis in 1990. The pregnancy was unplanned, conceived on a charged night after a glamorous Figland museum event left Jules feeling inadequate compared to Ash and Ethan’s life, and then suddenly grateful for what she and Dennis had. Dennis, however, has been emotionally affected after surviving his stroke. None of his replacement antidepressants have proved effective, and he loses his job at MetroCare after experiencing a mental health crisis during an ultrasound procedure. He spends years without employment, and experiences a persistent low-grade depression his doctor calls “dysthymia.”

Rather than seeking further clinical work, Dennis becomes Aurora’s full-time caregiver, a role that unexpectedly affirming. The repetitive, quiet rhythms of caring for a young child are soothing in a way adult professional life was not.

Three months after Aurora’s birth, Ash gives birth to Larkin Templeton Figman. The two new mothers bond over their shared experience of early parenthood, but their daughters turn out to be very different: Aurora is raucous, physical, and commanding, eventually renaming herself Rory; Larkin is calm, literary, and delicately beautiful. The contrast between the families deepens: Ash and Ethan move into a large Greenwich Village brownstone staffed by a Jamaican couple, while Jules, Dennis, and Rory remain cramped in their fifth-floor walk-up.

Ash visits Jules to confide in her. Ash’s parents, facing reduced finances after Gil’s retirement and the collapse of his firm, have asked Ash to take over the cost of supporting Goodman in Iceland. Ash agrees, secretly funneling a small portion of Ethan’s Figland earnings to her brother via a separate financial arrangement Ethan knows nothing about. She also maintains a secret phone to stay in contact with Goodman.

The chapter closes with Jules attending a professional conference at the Waldorf Hotel, where she approaches the elderly Dr. Spilka, Goodman’s former therapist. Jules asks him obliquely whether Goodman was guilty. Dr. Spilka first confirms he remembers the case, then insists Goodman murdered the girl and was imprisoned. Jules corrects him, and his daughter intervenes to explain that he has dementia and confuses cases. Jules is left shaken but ultimately feels no closer to certainty.