The novel leaps forward more than two decades. Now narrated largely in the second person, addressed directly to Yash, Part II recounts his one-night visit to the narrator’s home in Maine during a trip up the coast to see friends. She is now married to Silas, a schoolteacher, with two young sons, Harry and Jack, and she has become an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist. At a seaside park Yash plays with the boys, who take to him with surprising ease; he climbs a pine tree with them and tells them the myth of Daphne fleeing Apollo, her arms becoming branches, Apollo feeling her heartbeat through the bark. A passing stranger assumes Yash is the boys’ father, and the narrator corrects her sharply, admitting she has not seen him in twenty-one years.
Interwoven flashbacks gradually reveal the buried history that Part I withheld. The narrator and Yash had become lovers after college, lived together, and dreamed of a future in Paris and New York; but Yash failed to follow through, and they came apart. We learn the narrator stayed with Carson in Brooklyn refusing Yash's calls, then went to her mother’s in Phoenix, where—pregnant—she carried the baby to term and placed the daughter she privately calls Daisy for adoption, choosing a couple who reminded her of an older version of herself and Yash. Across the years Yash had sent oblique tokens of love: he phoned when Ivan died of a sudden infection and read her a Céline passage about a kiss not properly given; he mailed her a D. H. Lawrence poem about elephants slow to mate. She tore them up. Now, over beers and dinner with her family, Yash insists her Maine house uncannily recreates the Breach—the radiator, the door moldings—and at the table he proves he still remembers Sir Hincomb Funnibuster and asks Silas, with elaborate courtesy, for the “Heart the Lover” card. She chooses not to tell him about their child. The next morning he leaves her his own worn paperback about Iceland and sheep, with the Céline passage tucked inside.
Analysis
Part II is built almost entirely on dramatic irony. The reader, piecing together the flashbacks, comes to understand the enormous secret the narrator is guarding even from the one person it most concerns—and the gulf between the warm domestic surface of the visit and the buried grief beneath it generates the section’s ache. The shift into second-person address is crucial: by speaking directly to “you,” the narration becomes an intimate apostrophe, a private reckoning with the beloved that the reader is permitted to overhear, and it performs the closeness the narrator could never fully act on in life.
Yash’s conviction that the narrator has rebuilt the Breach in Maine is one of the book’s most quietly devastating ideas. Whether or not the resemblance is real, it suggests that she has unconsciously reconstructed the site of her happiest and most formative love inside the settled life she chose instead. The Daphne myth Yash tells her sons becomes the section’s central symbol: a woman transformed to escape a pursuing man, her heartbeat still detectable through the bark—an emblem of love arrested and preserved rather than consummated, feeling that survives transformation and the passage of time. Against all this, Silas embodies a different model of love entirely: undramatic, durable, and secure—the man who once won her with a postcard and who does not need to know what the dinner guests thought of him. The Céline passage Yash leaves behind is his coded confession, the closest he can come to admitting that he, like the book’s epigraph, failed to give himself fully to the love before him while saving himself for some imagined later.
