Lila finally leaves Stefano, disappears and is living with Nino in cheap apartment in the worst neighborhood of the neighborhood. Everyone thinks she is in Pisa with Elena, though there is no evidence of this. An article in the newspaper signed by Nino is really the work of Lila, as Elena recognizes on reading it.
Their co-habitation only lasts 23 days. Nino leaves Lila. Eventually, we learn he is studying in Milan. Enzo, a character I hadn't especially noticed before, finds her and accompanies him back to Stefano. She tells her husband that she is pregnant and the baby is not his, but he seems to think she is lying about it. Now she just stays home instead of working in the family sausage shop, and sees nobody except for her mother and mother-in-law.
The narrator makes a perfunctory remark about how she knows details what has happened, since she is narrating everything in the 3rd person: things she cannot have possibly known first hand. She says she has pieced it together from Lila's notebooks and from what other people have told her. I think people who like this kind of novel don't care as much about this kind of lapse of narrative technique as I do: to me it feels arbitrary to switch back and forth between two different types of narration, but yet have the prose texture remain so constant.
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