- We find Holly and the narrator in Joe's bar the next day. Holly is already drunk and it's not even noon, and she and the narrator are talking about Doc.
- Holly tells the narrator that she never considered divorcing Doc since she assumed she was too young for the marriage to be considered legal in the first place, and she also reveals that she and Doc had sex the night before. The narrator is shocked to hear this and, "for the first time since [he'd] known her, [Holly] seemed to feel a need to justify herself" (10.3). She tells the narrator that she and Doc really do love each other after all and he's surprised to learn that Holly has been praying for Doc all these years.
- After sleeping together, Doc and Holly spend the rest of the night in the bus station, and Doc assumes that Holly is going to return to Texas with him. She tries to make him see that she's not the same person as before, but she realizes that, in some ways, she is: "I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds" (10.5).
- She tells Joe and the narrator that Doc's "mistake" was that he fell in love with a "wild thing" (10.7), and that wild things can't ever be tamed. After getting Doc to finally see this, they part ways amicably (at least according to Holly), and he heads back to Texas without her.
- Holly toasts Doc and says to herself more than to anyone else that the city is "such an empty place; so vague" (10.11), and she's glad that Doc doesn't have to live there.