Chapter 5 Summary

This chapter involves all things domestic in the life of Reta Winters. She describes her home in great detail. The reader is permitted a glimpse of Reta as a house-proud wife and mother. The work of writing and its world of alternative reality has been brushed aside for the moment, and Reta leads the reader on a grand tour of her Ontario farmhouse perched on a high hill in the rolling back country north of Toronto.

Reta reminisces at length about the McGinn Family, who had owned the house previously. Reta has many questions about their lives, their hopes and dreams, their relationships. She admits that she often thinks about this family even though she has never met them. As she discovers one of the family's old letters, left behind by the furnace, Reta muses to herself that it might be a suicide...