Summary

Eleanor wakes in the dark in her publisher’s girlfriend’s, Shannon’s, apartment in Manhattan and gets up and ready for the day as if it were morning. The events of the chapter are seen through her perspective. She has allotted too much time in the city for her book meetings and has no motivation to fill her time with sightseeing or making an appointment to verify that her cancer has returned.

During the drive from Broken River her back began to hurt fiercely again. By the time she made it to Shannon’s apartment all of her plans to visit many of New York’s cultural landmarks gave way to exhaustion and general laziness. She reads books instead of leaving the apartment, and once she wrote to the author of a book she was particularly enjoying only to receive a perfunctory, generic...