Summary

This chapter is told from the perspective of Clare Wilby, sister to the dead girl Sara, as she either writes or talks to herself late at night, just before dawn. It is implied that she is writing/speaking after having left the Global Hotel that night, after the events witnessed by Penny in the previous chapter. Every paragraph begins with an ampersand (“&”), and there are no commas, periods, or other forms of punctuation in the chapter, other than apostrophes. Clare remembers that Sara had been a promising competitive swimmer, who might have made the national team if she had lived longer, and had improved her butterfly stroke by “0.45 of a second” (186). She says she wondered at one point if Sara had committed suicide, but now is certain that wasn’t the case. She recalls a classroom discussion of Tess of the D’Urbervilles...