The New Couple in 5B

The second part of the novel, “Act 2” begins with a chapter narrated by Willa Winter in 1963. Willa cannot understand why her husband Paul believes their sunny apartment in the Windermere is haunted. She tries her best to be a good husband to Paul, keeping their apartment clean and herself beautiful. Despite their best efforts, she cannot get pregnant, and she worries that Paul is going to leave her. She also maintains her affair with her mysterious unnamed lover, sneaking out to see him hours after having sex with Paul. When the lover gets drunk and aggressive, Willa decides to end the affair and rededicate herself to Paul.

In the present, Rosie digs through a box of documents Ivan collected about the apartment and wonders what the Winters’ marriage was like. She is confused to find Chad wearing a good luck charm, a gift from Ella. He explains that he hopes the older neighbors can be their new family after Ivan’s death. Rosie receives a call from Dana, who claims to have important information about Chad. Rosie reluctantly decides to meet with Dana and bring her a box of photographs left by Ivan. Abi calls her a cab and helps her load up the box. However, when she arrives, Rosie realizes that the box is not in the cab.

Rosie wonders if and why Abi took the box intended for Dana. She explains the situation to Max over lunch, and he suggests that maybe she left the box at home. When she protests, he reminds her of her history of visions, including a time when she had a vision of a woman being pushed onto a subway five minutes before it happened. Rosie dismisses the idea, though she is privately grateful that she has an appointment with her psychologist the next day. The night of the subway accident, Rosie and Max had sex. He admits that he had feelings for her then and regrets not having said anything. Max insists on coming to the meeting with Dana.

In 1963, Willa and Paul walk home from a screening of Cleopatra. Willa wonders what it feels like to be as famous as Elizabeth Taylor, while Paul wonders if he should switch to writing historical epics. On the walk home, Willa sees her ex-lover, who has been stalking her for days, following them. Worried that he will confront her and Paul, she begs Paul to take her home. At home, she considers telling Paul about the affair but worries it would destroy him. Instead, she announces that she is pregnant. Paul is overjoyed. Privately, Willa hopes that the baby is Paul’s and not her ex-lover’s.

According to her parents, Rosie had her first vision at age 3, when she correctly predicted that a fire would break out in the kitchen. Her father called her a seer and encouraged her to share her visions with others. The psychologist Rosie sees as an adult believes that she simply has an active imagination and was gaslit by her family into believing in coincidences. Rosie mostly accepts this explanation, though she worries that her visions have come true too many times to be dismissed as coincidence. Max and Rosie arrive at the address Dana provided and find a studio with her name on it. When Dana doesn’t answer the door or her phone, they open the unlocked door and walk in.

Inside, Dana’s studio is clean and bright. The walls are covered with her photographs, mostly nudes. Rosie is shocked to see a portrait of her husband Chad among the nudes: He looks young, and she assumes it was taken before they met. In the darkroom, she finds more pictures of Chad that seem to have been taken without his knowledge. Among the pictures is one of a man dancing in a nightclub with a woman. She thinks she recognizes the man, but she cannot identify the woman. In the studio’s back room, Rosie finds Dana dead, hanging from the ceiling. Dana is wearing the Hamsa hand charm Chad was wearing that morning.

Max calls the police, but Rosie is unable to reach Chad, despite multiple calls and texts. Rosie insists that Dana wouldn’t have killed herself hours after calling to schedule a meeting. Max suggests that maybe Dana wanted Rosie to find her after her death. Rosie lies to the investigating detective, telling him that Dana had invited her to the studio to discuss photography. Rosie suggests that they check her phone, and they discover that Chad called Dana’s phone repeatedly. Chad calls Rosie and tells her not to visit Dana. When Rosie reveals that Dana is dead, Chad tells her not to speak to the detective until he arrives with their lawyer.

Chad explains to Detective Crowe that Dana had struggled with depression since childhood, and that she had been obsessed with him for years. He says that she left him a voicemail threatening to ruin his life if he didn’t give her the Windermere apartment, but he claims not to know how she planned to extort him. Later, Rosie reveals to their lawyer, Olivia, that she stole some of the photographs Dana secretly took of Chad. At the Windermere, Abi insists that Rosie left the building without a box. Rosie is infuriated and feels gaslit. She is shocked to find the box of files in her apartment, missing a letter from Ivan to Dana.