Jude looks out across Central Park from the inside of Mount Sinai hospital. He’s in a hallway waiting while Eliza gives birth to her baby. Jude thinks that it is a coincidence, but not a very big one, that this child is being born in the same hospital where he was born, to the alcoholic teenager who gave him up for adoption to Les and Harriet.

He goes down with Di to look at the newborns at the nursery. Di has been more relaxed since she successfully gained an annulment of the marriage between Johnny and Eliza on the account that it was never consummated. Plus, Ravi has dropped his adoption lawsuit, writing that he and his wife have decided to adopt a child from India. Jude hasn’t heard anything from Johnny, who has gone to San Francisco with Rooster to start a band and check out the underground music scene in California. Eliza has received an envelope with cash in it, with a single note written in Johnny’s handwriting: “for the baby.”

That fall Jude starts school at East Community High School. He lives with his father and still hangs out with the straight-edge crew, skating and going to rock concerts. One day during a lunch a girl asks to sit with him, but Jude says that he has a girlfriend, that she’s in Europe but is going to a private school in the Upper West Side in the spring, a statement that is only halfway a lie.

In the early evening the baby is born. It is a boy, not a girl as Eliza has hoped. Jude watches as the baby is taken away. Eliza closes her eyes and does not look and does not even learn the baby’s gender. That night Jude goes down to the nursery and asks to hold the newborn, but he gives it back after only a few seconds because he doesn’t want to become attached.

Eighteen years later, Jude comes back to New York with his wife and kid to witness the final concert at CBGB, the iconic punk club on the Lower East Side. As he and his wife stroll through the streets around Tompkins Square Park, he cannot believe that the derelict area once populated by vagrants and drug addicts has become a hip, family-friendly neighborhood. Jude wonders what Johnny would think of how much the neighborhood has changed. He thinks about how much he misses Teddy and Johnny, and how they are in the same world now.

After leaving their daughter with Les, who is meeting his granddaughter for the first time, Jude and his wife head down to the concert. As Jude enjoys the show, he scans the crowd of young punk-rock enthusiasts, hoping to see a young man with the same features as Teddy and Eliza, their son, whom Jude has been looking for in every crowd for the past eighteen years. He wonders how old he will be when he finally gives up looking.