Over breakfast, Urania and the nurse talk about her father’s condition. The nurse tells Urania that her cousins still visit daily, around noon, and that her Aunt Adelina used to visit daily, as well, but stopped after breaking her hip. After breakfast, Urania climbs the stairs to her father’s bedroom. At first greeted by intense light, she begins to make out the room’s details: “the bed covered by a gray spread, the old bureau with its oval mirror, the photographs on the walls” (44), including a picture of her Harvard commencement, which she is surprised to see. After marveling at how different, how old and decrepit her father looks, she greets him but judges from his response that he doesn’t recognize her. She talks to him about her life, telling him she never married and recalling how her father used to call women who “never caught a husband” failures (45). She talks about books and about her research on the Trujillo years. She wonders “if His Excellency also took [her] mother to bed” (46).

Urania hears a car outside and the doorbell ringing. She immediately has a flashback: Trujillo is at the door, and she is her mother, sending Trujillo away because Agustín is not home.