Two months later, Abigail finds Lucas dead in their Winchester backyard at age 90. Daphne calls Eddie, who calls it a good death.

Daphne and Leda cancel their obligations and take the train to Winchester to support their half-brothers, Christopher and Matthew, with arrangements. Lucas had enthusiastically invested in an experimental hemp-and-mushroom casket designed to consume the body in 45 days. On the train, Leda argues that being loved but largely left alone as children made the sisters capable and independent—a better outcome than the entangled dependency she sees in over-parented families. Daphne reflects on similar dynamics among her students.

They arrive without calling ahead. Their half-brothers are delighted to see them, and the four share fond memories of Lucas. Christopher reports that Abigail is resting after a dispute with the mushroom-casket company, which has put Lucas on a waiting list.

Daphne slips outside to the backyard spot where Lucas died. Reflecting on both Lucas and Buddy, she sends a wordless request that they look after Eddie. Abigail arrives with Daphne’s forgotten jacket, worries that no one seems to grieve Lucas, and fears that her own children will react the same way when she’s gone. Daphne embraces her and reassures her that she would be mourned deeply.

Eddie’s active retirement—including opera, theater, museum memberships, lectures, and bookstore events—draws Jonathan, Leda, Steve, and others for various outings. Daphne has claimed chemotherapy as her territory.

In July, she picks Eddie up; he now uses a cane and tires easily. In the taxi, Eddie jokes that freezing in the old car crash would have spared him considerable current trouble. At the busy clinic, the journey has already worn him out. While they wait over an hour, he reveals that he and Abigail exchange handwritten notes to work through their shared regrets. Near the end of the wait, he quietly declares that he will never be angry at anyone again and falls asleep.

In the treatment pod, Eddie describes reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying) and explains the concept of the “bardo”: a transitional state where souls get stuck if they can’t accept that they’ve died. He asks Daphne to tell him he’s dead when the time comes and to involve Leda and Henry but not Jonathan, whom he doesn’t want to think of him as foolish. He proposes that they practice by silently guiding Lucas’s spirit forward; Daphne obliges, imagining herself in the Winchester backyard. They discuss whether Mary Carter’s deathbed visions were a form of the bardo; Eddie recalls his dying mother being similarly visited by her dead sister.

After the appointment, Daphne insists on taking Eddie home. In the lobby, his doorman tells them that Skip is upstairs with dinner. Eddie, exhausted from the day, leans against him. Skip invites Daphne to stay, but she needs to get home to Jonathan. While watching the two men support each other, she realizes that she understands nothing about other people’s relationships.

On the street, Daphne calls Jonathan and can barely speak. He confesses that when Candy was dying, he often left her alone during chemo sessions even though everyone believed he was accompanying her throughout treatment. He says that his failure makes what Daphne does for Eddie all the more remarkable. Daphne hails a taxi, her thoughts turning to Whistler, the horse who exceeded everyone’s expectations.

The narrative returns to the overnight hours in the wrecked car. Pinned with a badly injured ankle, Eddie lies awake contemplating his mortality and the conflicting paths his life has taken, concluding that he has been trying to live too many lives at once. He credits Buddy’s emergency space blanket with keeping them alive through the night.

When Daphne says she needs to use the bathroom, they devise a solution with an empty drink cup—Eddie sings to give her privacy while she maneuvers in the backseat, and then she stands on the armrest, cranks open a rear window, and disposes of the contents into the night. They repeat the process for Eddie, with Daphne singing a Chevrolet commercial jingle. He tells her that he can’t think of anyone he would rather be in a car crash with.

At dawn, heavy snowfall has partially buried the car. Eddie—afraid of fire—lies and tells Daphne that the engine is dead to stop her from running the heater. He instructs her to climb the hill, check the farmhouse, find a road, and knock on doors. When she voices fear of strangers, he insists that good people vastly outnumber dangerous ones. They argue over the space blanket; he wants her to take it, she refuses, and she resolves the standoff by leaving it behind. She kisses him, declares her love, and climbs out. Her face appears one last time in the window: She says she’s coming back to save him. As she disappears, Eddie says the name Whistler and waves.

On a Saturday in late September, Daphne has been telling Leda more about the car accident. Leda, stunned, insists that Daphne saved Eddie’s life. Abigail has come to New York to see Eddie for the first time in 45 years. The group eventually travels to his Chelsea apartment, where his housekeeper serves a catered lunch.

Eddie and Abigail greet each other with evident warmth. She’s moved by the shelf of books he edited and expresses regret at having walked away from publishing after marrying Lucas. Eddie deflects, saying that she left during the industry’s best years.

Over lunch, Eddie asks to hear the part he never knew: what Daphne did after climbing out. She describes jumping from the overturned car into deep snow, tying his necktie to a tree branch to mark the spot, finding an empty farmhouse, getting lost in the blowing snow, and relocating the marker. Reasoning that the road had to be close since they had driven off it, she followed the tree line and found it. A woman at a small house pulled her inside; her husband, Frank, organized the response and rode with Daphne in the police car to guide the crew. When Eddie was carried up on a stretcher, Daphne ran to take his hand. Jonathan, hearing the full account for the first time, is shaken by how close Daphne came to dying as a child.

After lunch, the four take a taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Eddie tires in the Medieval section, he and Daphne sit on a bench while Jonathan and Abigail continue on. Daphne tells Eddie that during her childhood walk through the snow, she had wished for a dog or dead loved ones to help her, the way Mary Carter had been visited. Eddie, growing drowsy, proposes that Daphne write their story down—the crash, Mary Carter, all of it—and says that he will be her editor. The book would give him a kind of immortality because, in it, he wouldn’t die; it would simply stop there, with the two of them on the bench. He rests his head on her shoulder and closes his eyes.

The ambulance crew stabilizes Eddie’s ankle before extracting him. Eddie insists that Daphne ride with him, and she’s strapped onto a second gurney inside the ambulance. He asks a crewman to shut off the siren and then whispers to Daphne that he invented a headache to accomplish it. Daphne is suddenly horrified to realize that she never said goodbye to Frank; Eddie promises that they’ll find him later to thank him properly.

He then recounts Daphne’s rescue mission to the crew, introducing her as his daughter and explaining how she climbed from the wreck, went for help in the snow, and brought the rescuers back. He declares that no one could find a better daughter. When the ambulance fishtails on ice, Eddie makes a small sound of pain, and Daphne reaches out her hand; he takes it, and they hold on for the rest of the ride. Daphne already feels a backward pull toward the hours they spent together in the frozen car, understanding them, even now, as the happiest of her life.