43 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca SerleIn Five Years
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 36-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 36 Summary
Dannie moves into Bella’s apartment and helps to care for her while her condition worsens. Bella is afraid that the little time she has left is being wasted on the misery of trying for an unlikely cure. Aaron and Bella reveal that they bought the Dumbo apartment and renovated it for Dannie. It is exactly the way it was in Dannie’s premonition. Bella chose everything and worked to make it perfect even when they weren’t speaking. Aaron and Dannie kiss in the apartment, and Dannie forgets briefly about all of the struggle and pain of the last several months.
Chapter 37 Summary
The kiss ends, and they’re not sure how to process it. All of Dannie’s things have been moved there and unpacked so she can stay in her new home. Bella calls and tells Dannie that after so many years of Dannie saying she never finishes anything, Bella wanted to finish this apartment for Dannie. In the closet, Dannie finds the dress she was wearing in the premonition with a note on it in Bella’s writing: “Wear this […] I always liked it on you” (229).
Chapter 38 Summary
Bella stops treatment because it isn’t working and is only making her sicker. Dannie goes to the hotel where Bella’s mother is staying to bring her back to the apartment to see Bella. Jill tells Dannie that it was love at first sight for Bella upon meeting Dannie and that she talked so much about Dannie after their meeting that Jill enrolled her in Dannie’s school. Jill says that she hasn’t come because she’s been a bad mother and has nothing to offer Bella that Dannie can’t. Dannie tells her that all she needs to offer is her presence.
Chapter 39 Summary
Dannie takes Jill to Bella’s apartment and leaves them alone together. Her own mother calls. Dannie immediately bursts into tears; her mother offers her help and takes over the work of canceling the wedding. Bella and Dannie talk about the reality of her death and dying. Bella is sad because she wanted to be there for all of Dannie’s life, and especially to see her in love. She says, “You’ve never had it […] I want the real thing for you” (237). Dannie tells her that she did have it, because she had Bella.
Chapter 40 Summary
Bella dies on Thursday, when Dannie is asleep. Bella’s parents plan a big, fancy, expensive funeral, which Dannie and Aaron know isn’t what she would have wanted. They plan something they know she would have liked and hold it on December 15, 2025, on a rooftop terrace, with Bella’s dearest friends. One friend reads a poem that Bella wrote and sent to her a month ago. Dannie and Aaron go to the Dumbo apartment when it ends.
Chapter 41 Summary
Dannie wakes from what must have been a nap, and the scene she saw in the premonition five years ago unfolds exactly the way she saw it. What she knows now that she did not know then is that the intensity of feeling she has is for Bella, not for Aaron. The engagement ring she wears is Bella’s, and it’s on Dannie’s middle finger so that she may feel close to Bella. She knows now that what she feels isn’t love, but rather grief.
Epilogue Summary: “After”
After they make love, Aaron and Dannie both realize that though they share this grief, they cannot make it better by turning towards each other. They have to weather it alone. Aaron broaches the idea of keeping up a friendship with weekly lunch or coffee, and Dannie agrees. She gives the engagement ring to Aaron. After he leaves, Dannie walks around the apartment. She finds a photo of herself and Bella at her family’s beach house many years ago. Bella was right: There was a blue awning. She walks to the deli on the corner, where she unexpectedly runs into Dr. Shaw. They stay and talk for an hour, at which point Dr. Shaw will ask Dannie if he can see her again. She will say yes, but in the moment where they meet, Dannie knows none of that. The novel ends with Dannie embracing the uncertainty. The novel ends: “But all of that is an hour from now. Now, on the other side of midnight, we do not yet know what is coming. So be it. So let it be” (250).
Chapter 36-Epilogue Analysis
Bella’s decision to stop treatment marks acceptance of the inevitability of her death. The novel has throughout held a nuanced tension between fate and free will; these final chapters interrogate the boundaries between what can be changed and what cannot. When Bella says that she’s “wasting” the time she has left, she critiques the view of life that Dannie has spent the novel unraveling. In prioritizing the quality of her time over the quantity of it, Bella reinforces the text’s argument for the value of the present.
The story’s tension declines alongside Bella’s health. With Dannie and David’s breakup finally accomplished, the missing engagement ring from the premonition is explained. The setting is revealed when Aaron takes Dannie to the apartment and explains that Bella bought and decorated it for Dannie. The red dress Dannie was wearing has been set aside for her by Bella to wear at the memorial she knows is coming. All the events of the premonition at the novel’s beginning come to their expected fruition, but with meanings radically different from those that Dannie or the reader could have anticipated.
The novel’s ending is grounded in grief and an interrogation of the concepts of fate and free will. A vision of the future showed Dannie what would happen, but not why or how or what it would mean. For someone as invested in preparation and planning as Dannie, this is a radical upheaval in her understanding of the world. The conclusion meaningfully supports the novel’s argument about the value of clarity of the present and the unreliable opacity of the future.
It is notable that the dialogue remains the same between the first premonition and the reality of the scene. Whether Dannie’s words continue to make sense in the new context is arguable, but it’s worth acknowledging that she delivers the lines despite having foreknowledge of what “should” be said and of what Aaron’s responses will be. Despite Dannie’s new perspective on honoring her feelings and being present in her current life, as well as her months of effort to stave off this exact scene, she allows it to happen exactly the way she’d seen it five years before. With the novel’s focus on the questions of the future and the present, fate, and free will, Dannie’s adherence to the script provides a particularly interesting opportunity for analysis from a number of angles.
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By Rebecca Serle
