As explained in my outline, Chapter 6 is unique in my novel, due to its being a long, first-person narrative. I am offsetting this by tailoring specific third person pieces to it, and placing these pieces before and after Chapter 6. The following is the first half of this "frame", which serves as the end of Chapter 5.
Splash. The woman who looked up from the basin of water into the mirror above it presented a striking image indeed. Blue-eyed and red-haired, she knelt before the vanity like a pale ghost. She was wildly unkempt and dripping wet, still ignoring the chair that she'd knocked aside in her rush for the basin. Something more than the mere cold of the water made her shiver, and the innumerable white streaks in her rust-coloured hair gave her a frantic and incongruous appearance. Faint lines of worry and grief had also begun to touch her young face. Not reaching for a towel, she merely let the icy water drip down her cheek uninterrupted, wanting the chill sensation on her skin to convince her that she was truly awake.
A whistle. She closed her eyes against the thought. A whistle. Just the memory of that low, clear sound made her breath come in more ragged gulps. The little room suddenly became more dark, more empty, and more silent. She folded her arms about herself, feeling unspeakably tired and forlorn. A name came to her then. Julia.
She put her head down on the vanity top. No, she didn't want to look up into that mirror anymore, didn't want to trace her sister's face in her own. She smiled bitterly. What a pale imitation she was, anyway. Julia--the scamp, the adventurer, the vixen, the fire--she had lived her life more fully in the last eight years of her life than this shadow, this lesser twin, had lived in all her thirty-two years. It was Julia who ought to be alive today, not this sister who for all her cool intellect could not focus nor resolve nor seize the long sought-after truth.
Nearly breaking down then, nearly falling apart utterly with the need to pray and beg incoherently of God, she finally held herself together. She raised herself up and refused her heart and her body the right to tremble.
She reached out and found her late father's watch on the corner of the vanity top, set aside as usual after its nightly winding. She opened the timepiece, careful not to fumble it, and soon had a proper, innocuous label to put to this wildly confused time and place: it was just past three thirty in the morning. In the dead of night, she was sitting awake and shivering about a whistle--a brief, soft reverberation of sound. Her reason at last took the terror out of the thought, and her heart finally stilled its frantic pace. She sat back on the floor and breathed out slowly.
Turning to face the bed at last, she blinked quietly and hugged her curled-up knees. She stared at that empty bed, that bell-rope, that clock, and every feature of the room that her eyes could make out in the darkness. She knew just one thing then--she would not sleep again tonight.