We return to the hospital room where Daisy is in traction. Benjamin responds to her cliffhanger question “Who told you?” with an enigmatic “Your friend wired me.” Daisy is acting a lot like Old Daisy, mumbling in a hospital bed. She says Benjamin is perfect. Her leg is broken in 5 places, and she may walk again with therapy but will never dance again. Benjamin wants to take her home to New Orleans or at least stay in Paris and take care of her but she refuses. She tells him she doesn’t want to be with him and to stay out of her life.

Old Daisy interjects to say she just didn’t want him to see her like that. Benjamin stays in Paris, supposedly to keep an eye on Daisy, but Old Daisy says she never knew that. Old Daisy asks Caroline to get the nurse. While Caroline is away, she says she learned to walk again and took the train to Lourdes. The nurse checks Daisy’s vitals and says they’re normal (well, normally bad). Her pulse is slowing and she’s going to struggle to breathe. 

Caroline tries to continue reading from the diary. Benjamin has written that he went home, and then torn a bunch of pages out. Caroline tries to continue “I listened to the sound of the house– I read that already.” Benjamin has also spilled a bunch of stuff on the pages so they’re hard to read. It says something about sailing.

Back in Benjamin’s story, he learns to sail using his father’s old boat, the Button Up. He enjoyed the company of a woman or two or three. A sexual beast. Then, it’s Spring of 1962. Queenie is getting old. Cate Blanchett Daisy returns to New Orleans. Benjamin and Daisy reunite, sitting across a table from each other and not saying much. Upstairs in Grandma Fuller’s old room, they have slow and methodical sex. A clock ticks in the hallway.

On Benjamin’s boat, they sail into the Gulf along the Florida Keys and watch a rocket ship blast off up into the sky. They hang out on tropical beaches and swim and have sex and such. Daisy says she’s glad they didn’t find each other when she was 26 because she was so young and he was so old. They sit through a tropical storm.

At night in a cottage Daisy talks about how she’s getting older. She asks Benjamin what it’s like getting younger. He says he can’t say because he’s always looking out his own eyes. He implies his mind is going to get younger with his body, that he’s going to begin wetting the bed and getting scared of things that live under the stairs.

Back in the hospital, a bit of a bombshell. Caroline asks Old Daisy, when did you meet dad? Daisy says it was some time after that. Caroline asks if he knew about Benjamin and Daisy says he knew enough. 

Back in the story, Benjamin and Daisy return to the nursing home to discover that in their absence Queenie has died. They attend a church service for her. She is buried next to Tizzy. Benjamin sells Thomas Button’s house to a couple, telling them that the family pictures are included with the house. 

Benjamin and Daisy buy a duplex. Old Daisy interrupts the story to say she loved that house because it smelled like firewood and to ask Caroline to keep reading. Daisy and Benjamin had no furniture in the duplex, just a mattress on the ground. They basically just stay up all night, act crazy, eat take out, watch the Beatles on TV, have sex, and play paint pranks on one another. 

Their neighbor, Mrs. Van Dam, is a physical therapist. They live near a YWCA and Daisy goes there to swim in the pool. Benjamin watches as she begins to weep after swimming laps. He tells her that even if she hadn’t hurt her leg, her dancing career would have ended like this. She says she’s just sad about getting old and that the pool has too much chlorine.

Benjamin takes Daisy to the same pier he brought his father to on the last day of his life. She promises she’ll never lose herself in self-pity again, realizes that neither of them is perfect, and becomes at peace. She opens a dance studio for young girls.

One day, after a class, she practices dancing alone in the studio, but her leg hinders her. Benjamin, lurking around the corner, tells her she’s beautiful. She tells him that dancing is about the line of your body, and once you lose that line, you’ll never get it back. 

Daisy says to Benjamin, “You were born in 1918, 49 years ago, I am 43, we are almost the same age.” End curio.