It Ends with Us

“Naked truths aren’t always pretty.” 

Lily and Ryle begin to know each other through their discussion of their personal experiences and honest interpretations of a given event. They will often ask each other for them as their relationship progresses. Lily’s diary entries could be seen as a distillation of her own naked truths as she comes to know the cycle of domestic abuse.

“Brave and bold.” 

Lily’s mother encourages Lily to take risks as she embarks on opening her flower shop. She urges Lily to be courageous again and leave Ryle after she learns of Lily’s abuse at his hands, noting that Lily showed that kind of courage when she supported her mother through her long years of abuse at the hands of her father.

“Plants reward you based on the amount of love you show them. If you’re cruel to them or neglect them, they give you nothing. But if you care for them and love them in the right way, they reward you with gifts in the form of vegetables or fruits or flowers.”

Lily’s passion is gardening because she feels that plants respond to the care she shows them. The novel links the response of plants to the response of people. The reciprocal care that Lily and Atlas show to one another blossoms into an enduring love between them. By contrast, the cruelty and carelessness that Lily’s father showed to Lily’s mother yields hate from Lily. Likewise, the carelessness that Ryle shows towards Lily ultimately dooms their relationship.

“Most plants need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.”

Atlas links the care of plants to the care of people, feeling saddened by his own abandonment, but Lily comforts him by showing him that some plants can survive alone. The novel demonstrates that while support is essential in overcoming a difficult situation, it is also possible to make one’s way alone. Atlas himself proves to be self-reliant. After receiving help from Lily, he forges his own future by himself.  

“Instead of helping others, people use the worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.” 

Lily’s father considers people who are in difficult circumstances guilty for being in such circumstances, and believes they are unworthy of help. Through Atlas, Lily learns that no one is unworthy of help and that there are more to circumstances than what is readily visible. The prejudice that people such as Lily’s father exhibit says more about their own failings, and their own self-centeredness and lack of compassion, than the failings of the people that they hold in contempt.

“This is just human nature, healing an old wound to prepare for a fresh new layer.” 

Lily reads over her old journals to find closure with her memories of Atlas while beginning a relationship with Ryle. While Lily, Atlas, and Lily’s mother live through difficult experiences, they are able to emerge from these experiences and move forward. Lily and Atlas find each other, and Lily’s mother herself is dating someone who treats her well.  

“Just keep swimming.” 

As teenagers, Lily and Atlas bond over Finding Nemo, finding the animated film encouraging as they both maneuver through the abuse of Lily’s father and Atlas’s own abandonment, respectively. As an adult, Lily tells this to herself as she deals with her own complicated situation of finding herself abused by Ryle and pregnant with his child.

“Occasionally when it was just the two of us, I saw glimpses of how a normal relationship with a father could be. Sitting at the kitchen table with him discussing colleges and career choices […] As much as I hated him most of the time, I still longed for more of these moments with him. If he could always be the guy he was capable of being in these moments, things would be so much different. For all of us.”

While Lily speaks at length of the hatred she feels towards her father for how he hurt her mother and even her, she’s still able to see the possibility of their relationship being different if his choices had been better. Lily is also able to see in herself her own yearning to be close to her father. She will use this insight to come to the conclusion that she should leave Ryle, so that her daughter can have the relationship with Ryle that she couldn’t have with her own father. 

“I realized that maybe she didn’t acknowledge it because that’s what she always does. Things that hurt her just get swept under the rug, never to be brought up again.” 

Witnessing the abuse that her mother suffers, Lily is torn between her love and her resentment towards her mother. As Lily comes to empathize with her mother, she sees that the reason for her mother’s behavior is her lack of support. Lily comes to gain a nuanced understanding that while problems are to be dealt with, sometimes space away from them is also necessary. When she first receives news of her pregnancy, she finds herself needing to retreat to Atlas’s place, in order to collect herself.

“Fifteen seconds. That’s all it takes to completely change everything about a person.” 

Ryle seems to be Lily’s ideal partner, but once he hurts her, she’s aware that their relationship has changed irrevocably. She will try to tell herself that Ryle is still the same person that she fell in love with, but ultimately she will discover that his selfishness with her makes them incompatible as a couple, no matter how much love there might be between them.

“All humans make mistakes. What determines a person’s character aren’t the mistakes we make. It’s how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.” 

Both Lily’s father and Ryle tried to excuse their assaults on their respective partners. In Ryle’s case, while he claims at various points that his explanations don’t justify his actions, the fact that he continues hurting Lily makes them excuses. At various points, Lily stresses that Ryle, knowing his own faults, should have approached her before the situation overwhelmed him. In not doing so, he reveals his poor character and his unsuitability for a relationship with Lily.

“We’d just been two people who helped each other when we needed it and got our hearts fused together along the way.” 

As Atlas and Lily say goodbye to each other as teenagers, Lily mentions her awareness that their relationship did not start as a romance, but rather through compassion. The compassion that they had for one another is what led to the strong feelings that developed between them.

“Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes.” 

Lily views the imprint that she left on Atlas like a big wave that creates an imprint on the sand. Further, she sees herself caught in the wave that is Ryle. Ultimately, Atlas will show himself to have left the same kind of imprint on Lily that she left on him. It’s this imprint that leads Lily to go over her old diaries and that will eventually draw them back together.

“Maybe love isn’t something that comes full circle. It just ebbs and flows, in and out, just like the people in our lives.” 

Lily has difficulty pinning down her feelings towards Atlas as she looks towards her past. On the one hand, she feels pained at having lost touch with him, but she is plunging into a new relationship. As Lily’s romantic love with Ryle wanes, and Atlas appears in her life again, she will turn to him and the promise of a relationship with reciprocal care.

“And us humans, we can’t expect to shoulder all of our pain. Sometimes we have to share it with the people who love us so we don’t come crashing down from the weight of it all.” 

After hearing of Ryle’s past, Lily encourages him to unburden himself of his painful memories. Lily gets support from Atlas, first as a teen and then later, when they meet again and he offers her further support. She also turns to Allysa and finally to her mother. Through the support that she receives, she is able to deal with the collapse of her and Ryle’s relationship and her pregnancy.

“If I could compare this feeling to something I would compare it to death. Not just the death of anyone. The death of the one. The person who is closer to you than anyone else in the world. The one who when you simply imagine their death, it makes your eyes tear up.” 

To bear the violence of a loved one brings about a sense of loss for Lily. Her relationship with Ryle was linked with the dreams of her success, of his success, of a future together. In having to suffer repeated violence at his hands, Lily loses the image she had of Ryle as her husband, her friend, and her lover, and the image she had of Ryle as a father becomes damaged as well.

“Shouldn’t there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers?” 

As she realizes that her experience is similar to her mother’s, Lily reflects on her own lack of compassion for her mother and those like her. She points to a culture of victim-blaming, in which the focus is on the abused person letting themselves be abused over the abuser and their own responsibility. 

“It’s not a person’s actions that hurt the most. It’s the love. If there was no love attached to the action, the pain would be a little easier to bear.” 

Ryle loves Lily, but his love for her is not enough to prevent him from lashing out in a rage. Unlike bearing violence at the hands of a stranger, being hurt by a loved one means grappling not only with the physical pain, but the pain that comes from loving that person who caused the pain and being loved by that person while knowing that it’s not enough.

“Sometimes even grown women need their mother’s comfort so we can just take a break from having to be strong all the time.” 

Lily struggles with telling her mother about her situation with Ryle out of fear that her mother will encourage her to forgive him, but at the same time she wants her mother’s support. She puts pressure on herself to be strong, especially now that she’s pregnant and has to think of her child. The situation with Ryle and her pregnancy is emotionally exhausting and Lily recognizes that she needs familial support.

“Never lose sight of your limit.” 

Lily’s mother explains that the reason why she stayed with Lily’s father until his death, despite the abuse she suffered, was because she lost sight of her limit. The more incidents of violence that she was subject to, the more tolerable the violence became.

“It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would just walk away without a second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person. When you experience it first hand, it isn’t so easy to hate the person who mistreats you when most of the time they’re your godsend.” 

The culture of victim blaming perpetuates itself through the false notion that it’s be simple to break ties with someone who hurts you. As she deals with the aftermath of her abuse and finds herself both angry and missing Ryle, Lily discovers that the conflicting emotions the survivor of abuse has towards their assailant are what make the relationship difficult to end.

“Sometimes parents have to work through their differences and bring a new level of maturity into a situation in order to do what’s best for a child.” 

Lily feels conflicted feelings towards Ryle, but among these is anger. Lily nonetheless puts her anger aside, knowing that it’s important for her child to have a relationship with Ryle and that it’s important, too, for Ryle grow into his role as a father.

“Cycles exist because they are excruciating to break. It takes an astronomical amount of pain and courage to disrupt a familiar pattern. Sometimes it seems easier to just keep running in the same familiar circles, rather than facing the fear of jumping and possibly not landing on your feet.” 

The novel stresses that domestic violence is cyclical. Lily witnessed her mother’s abuse yet finds herself drawn into a similar pattern with Ryle. To leave Ryle is to let go of her hopes for a relationship and family with him. It means exposing herself to the judgment of those who will want her to stay with Ryle. Lily’s fear of being alone, and of the disapproval she might face from Allysa or her mother, makes her empathize with her mother, who didn’t have the financial security and the support system that Lily has. In the end, both Allysa and her mother fully support Lily’s choices.