Daniel visits Nuria Monfort in her dark, cramped apartment and learns she is barely surviving on translation work while her husband, Miquel, has been imprisoned for union leaflets. Nuria’s loneliness and guardedness make Daniel suspect she is weighing whether he can be trusted, but she agrees to talk about Julián Carax.

Nuria explains she met Carax through Cabestany’s publishing house and knew him mostly through letters and editorial business, finally staying a week in his Paris apartment in 1933 because Cabestany wanted to avoid hotel costs. She describes Carax as intensely private and seemingly trapped in memories, “living within himself” inside his books. She recounts fragments of his past: a French mother who took him to Paris to keep him from the army, and a violent, strict “hatter” who beat Carax’s mother and told Carax he was “the son of sin” and destined to fail; Carax believed the hatter was not his real father.

When Daniel asks about Penélope, Nuria says Carax never mentioned her and seems skeptical of gossip about Carax’s supposed 1936 marriage to an older wealthy widow and a duel on the wedding day. Instead, Nuria reveals what she does know: in the summer of 1936, during the early war months, the municipal morgue received a body identified as Julián Carax, found in a Raval alley in rags with a bullet through his heart, carrying a copy of The Shadow of the Wind and his passport showing he had crossed from France a month earlier. Carax’s father refused to claim the body, and it was buried in a common grave at Montjuïc; Nuria never learned the exact location.

Nuria says she tried to investigate and filed a complaint, but a young inspector named Fumero warned her to stop asking questions. Later, someone using the name Laín Coubert approached Cabestany’s firm to buy all remaining copies of Carax’s novels; Nuria links Coubert’s voice to a March 1936 caller who claimed to be “Jorge” and asked for Carax’s Paris address, laughing when refused. The same night Coubert negotiated, Cabestany’s warehouse burned, destroying the stock—except the copies Nuria rescued and hid in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

As they speak, Nuria suggests that destroying Carax’s books is a way of destroying Carax himself, since he poured himself into his characters. The conversation turns intimate and charged: Nuria tells Daniel that Carax died believing nobody would remember him, and that people exist as long as someone remembers them. She ends the meeting by urging Daniel to leave, asks him to lie to her father that she is well, and kisses Daniel on the cheek before closing the door, leaving Daniel shaken and newly burdened by what he has learned.