67 pages • 2 hours read
Colleen HooverIt Ends with Us
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 25-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
The next morning, Lily wakes up to Atlas making breakfast for her and they talk about how much Atlas likes cooking. Atlas asks Lily to stay and tells her that while he has to leave for work, he will check in on her. Lily writes an entry in the form of a letter to Ellen DeGeneres, as she had years before. This time, she vents her conflicted feelings towards Ryle and her mother. She feels not only anger at Ryle, but also grief at losing the image she had of him. “It’s a sense,” she writes, “that I’ve lost my best friend, my lover, my husband, my lifeline” (282). She confesses her worry over her future child, given her own childhood and having watched her mother live through her father’s abuse. Lily decides she can’t return to Ryle.
Chapter 26 Summary
Messages from Allysa, who doesn’t know what’s happened, make Lily feel guilty for being at Atlas’s place. Lily spends time with Atlas, watching the Ellen DeGeneres show like they did when they were teenagers. She apologizes for her behavior in the restaurant when Atlas confronted Ryle. “Deep down,” she tells him, “I knew you were right, but I didn’t want to believe it” (287). Atlas tells her he hoped he’d been wrong about Ryle. Lily struggles with blaming herself over what happened and even struggles to not blame Atlas, for not finding her like he promised. She recognizes that she’s being irrational. When Lily is about to go to bed, Atlas asks her to stay as long as she needs. Lily responds that she’ll stay a few more days.
Chapter 27 Summary
Lily returns to work and spends her day worried that Ryle will approach her. He shows up at the shop in the afternoon and informs her that he will be leaving for his training in England. Lily reflects that he knows an apology won’t fix their relationship, and that “the best thing for [them] right now is separation” (291). She tells Ryle he should have asked about Atlas, and that she would have been honest, but that he didn’t ask for her help.
Chapter 28 Summary
After her confrontation with Ryle, Lily decides she’s not ready to go to her apartment and goes to Atlas’s house instead. She hasn’t told Allysa what has happened yet. As she’s texting with her, trying to pretend everything is normal, two men show up at Atlas’s place, friends who regularly come over for poker night. She contacts Atlas, currently at work. He forgot to cancel with them, but offers to call them to do so. Lily decides she will play poker with them, and by the time Atlas gets home has gotten to know them. Lily asks Atlas’s friends about the girlfriend Atlas told her about, and learns that Atlas lied about her existence. This makes Lily feel that Atlas lied to keep her away and she feels embarrassed, especially with her current situation in mind.
Later, in private, she asks Atlas why he didn’t come back for her. Atlas confesses that he did years ago, but saw her happy with someone else and felt that he “had nothing to offer [her], but love, and to [him], [Lily] deserved more than that” (305).He admits not knowing why he lied, that perhaps he felt jealous, and does regret lying to her. Lily asks him to take her home and resolves to deal with the issues in her life on her own. She thanks him, knowing that this is good-bye. Atlas says that he will always be there for her, but can’t have a casual relationship with her because of their history. He admits his strong feelings for her remain and asks that if she’s ever able to be in a situation to fall in love, that she should fall in love with him. Afterwards, Lily mentions she feels like she’s suffered through “two separate heartaches in the course of two days” (310).
Chapters 25-28 Analysis
As Lily spends more time with Atlas, she struggles with confusion and loss with respect to both her relationship with Ryle and her relationship with Atlas. With Ryle, Lily feels hatred but also grief at losing their relationship, and has to stop herself from absolving him from blame by taking it on herself. Lily recognizes the impulse to change her own behavior, which excuses Ryle for his actions. “The reasoning,” she writes in her entry to Ellen DeGeneres, “forces me to imagine our future together and how there are things I could do to prevent that type of anger” (282). To add to the confusion is the double bind that Lily is in with respect to her child, who now has “to grow up in a broken home or an abusive one”(283). This makes her feel like she is already to blame for having failed her daughter.
Her confusion with Atlas comes from Lily’s belief that while he told her on her sixteenth birthday that he would find her, he did not do so, along with her later discovery that he did indeed find her but chose to let her go. Caught in so many emotions, Lily has to resist the impulse of thinking she wouldn’t have suffered so much if he had approached her, and irrationally blaming him. When Atlas does admit that he sought her long ago and found her happy with someone else, and didn’t feel worthy of a relationship with her, Lily feels an even stronger sense of loss. “My fingers move on the tattoo on my shoulder,” she says, “I begin to wonder if I’ll ever be able to fill in that hole now” (305).
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By Colleen Hoover
