Summary

At Christmas, Adriana hurts a blackened baby tooth while eating a piece of nougat and the narrator extracts it for her. Adriana is sad at the prospect of her sister moving to the city for school, and the girls make a pact to stay together. The narrator then talks about the baby Giuseppe and the institution where he lives now as an adult. She and Adriana visit him there together. He is an avid drawer and the only one of the brothers to finish middle school.

During the first winter with her biological family, the narrator wins a school contest that comes with a cash prize deposited into a bank account for her. The mother wants to take the money out but the father insists it belongs to the narrator. The narrator celebrates her birthday alone with a single pastry in the spring...