Dom Casmurro ends with the conclusion of its own accuser. After the coffee cup scene, Bentinho takes Capitu and Ezequiel to Europe and leaves them in Switzerland. He returns to Brazil, does not seek her out on the following trips, and simulates a married life to deceive public opinion. Dona Glória and José Dias die. Capitu dies and is buried in Switzerland. Ezequiel, now grown, appears at the Engenho Novo, and Bentinho sees in him "the very, the exact, the true Escobar." Months later, on a study trip to the East, the young man dies of typhoid fever near Jerusalem.
In the final two chapters, the narrator says that the women friends he had afterward did not make him forget his first love, "perhaps because none had eyes of undertow, nor those of an oblique and dissembling gypsy." And he states that the "rest" of the book is knowing whether the Capitu of Glória beach was already inside the one of Matacavalos, or was changed by some incident. He answers yes: "one was inside the other, like the fruit inside the peel."
The book closes with the sentence in which Bentinho says that his first female friend and his greatest friend ended up joining together and deceiving him, wishes that the earth may rest lightly on them, and moves on to the History of the Suburbs, the project he had set aside at the beginning. The ending does not resolve the doubt: the last word is the narrator's reading, with no proof beyond it.