- Back in the world of Clarissa Vaughan, it is now mid-afternoon, and Clarissa has returned to Richard's apartment to help him get dressed for the party.
- When Clarissa steps into Richard's apartment, she's taken aback by how sunny it is. Richard has pulled up all of the blinds and opened all of the windows.
- As she heads further in, Clarissa finds Richard sitting on one of his windowsills, straddling it like a horse. They're five stories up, and so she tells him (trying to contain her panic) that he needs to get down.
- Richard doesn't get down. Instead, he lifts one of his dangling legs up onto the sill and stays perched right where he is.
- As Richard tells Clarissa that he doesn't think he can make it to the party after all, Clarissa asks him again to get down. They go back and forth like this for a minute, until Richard confesses that he doesn't feel like he can continue to face the days and the hours ahead of him.
- Richard asks Clarissa to tell him a story, and, after protesting, she tells him about going out to buy flowers that morning.
- Together, the two old friends reminisce about the summer when they were eighteen and nineteen years old and in love with each other, and Richard tells Clarissa that he feels like a failure for never having been able to capture their lives in writing.
- Then, after telling Clarissa that he loves her, Richard shifts his body and lets himself fall from the window.
- Clarissa screams and runs to the window to look down at his body below. Then, she turns and runs out of the apartment and down the stairs, and she soon finds her way out of the building and into the space where the body is lying.
- Richard's house-robe is bunched up around his head, and when Clarissa pulls it away she sees how badly his skull has been destroyed.
- Clarissa pulls the robe back again and sits there kneeling over him, trying to think of what to do, and of what she would say to Richard now if she could only bring herself to speak.