Summary

In Part 2, Chapter 5, the narrator and the friend look at the portrait in the rental house, and they notice that the face of the woman seems to have become less stern, as if she has accepted the guests’ presence. The narrator reads the end of the thriller novel aloud to the friend. The thriller’s final sections reframe its previous sections as a fictionalized account written by a woman the killer had targeted. The narrator and the friend then talk about modern literature. The friend says that she wished more books celebrated people rather than focus on humanity’s flaws. The narrator then finds a book of fairy tales and reads those to the friend. The narrator enjoys the clarity of good and evil that the fairy tales illustrate. After the narrator stops reading aloud to the friend, the two women hold each other...