It Ends With Us

'It Ends With Us' is a romantic, new adult, fiction piece looking at the life of Lily Bloom. The book does a great job first introducing us to Lily and her inner thoughts. Specifically, at this moment, her thoughts on and of death. Having just been to her the mayor, her father's, funeral, and having given a eulogy at the funeral she says that she isn't considering suicide, and maybe she didn't end up on the roof of the building she was staying in because she was contemplating suicide but now she is on a ledge on top of the building and thinking about how much she hated the experience of going to her father's funeral, and of how she isn't going to be committing suicide.

When you're thinking about something so much, to the point where you're almost reassuring yourself that you aren't going to die tonight, there might be a slight contradiction between the words being said the what is being implied.

While she is on the roof, definitely not thinking of throwing herself from it, another person is introduced into the fray (whose name we learn is Ryle Kincaid) and the first we see of him is being extremely fragile, and then assaulting an innocent chair. After noticing that she is there, on the side of the building, his nerves begin to show, and Lily, who definitely isn't considering suicide, decides to come down after a little convincing from Ryle.

They learn about each other and find that they have more in common than they previously thought. They share secrets, more than anyone would be willing to share with a random stranger they met just that night, except they are both in a place emotionally where they don't really care about that, and it feels like the instant attraction between them isn't only physical. It transcends that, and there are sparks of an emotional relationship between the two brewing.

But we also start to learn about Atlas, who was Lily's first love, and the first person who she cared about romantically. She doesn't mention how they broke up at this point in the book, but there are assumptions made considering how he was homeless when they first met, and her father was the mayor of a town which instantly brings to the front the possibility that her father forbade them from seeing each other by hanging money over her head that she would need to survive at that age.

Lily quits her job six months later and opens her own flower shop. She hires someone called Allysa, her new employee, who messages her husband and her brother to come after Lily has a fall and she finds out that Ryle is Alyssa's brother. They act like they don't know each other, but as time passes, and Ryle starts wanting her more (even literally begging her, on his knees, in her house to let him have a one-night stand with her) and at Alyssa's birthday party, where she has brought a 'date' (her gay friend) with her Ryle starts getting jealous. This jealously ends up having him run up to her as she is leaving the apartment and carrying her back into the bedroom. To prove that he actually likes her and that he isn't just using her, she requests him to not have sex with her, and they end up sleeping together without doing anything sexual that night.

In the morning she tells Alyssa how they had met before, and she starts to give Lily a warning about her brother before he walks into the room and interrupts Alyssa. This is the first warning sign that maybe he isn't the best person to pursue, even if he is devilishly handsome, and is willing to throw away his pride to be with her sexually, that doesn't mean that he is going to be good in a relationship and if they're seeing each other casually then it means he can continue to have his one night stands that he so loves and she can't really say anything because they haven't established what they are doing together. If his own sister knows that he doesn't have a good track record with relationships, then maybe there is something wrong with his mindset when dating people.

"When he was wiping that cow 'crap' on me, it was quite possibly the most turned-on I've ever been."

Because she is still occasionally reading her old diaries about the man she first had sex with, Atlas, we can see the contrast in her relationship with him, and her relationship now with Ryle. While what she has with Ryle now is hot, heavy, and contains a lot of sexual tension, her relationship with Atlas was filled with a lot more like a friendship and just loving the other's company. They would tend to her garden together, she would help him with food and showers because he was homeless, and he would be there to comfort her when her father started hitting her mother and her mother rejected her help.

Her dislike, or rather apathy towards her mother, is understandable as she continues reading the diary entries. Especially in a certain moment where her father is choking her mother out and she jumps on his back to try and get him to stop, causing him to fling her off and causing a gash to form on her head. Her mother takes her to the hospital, and you think,' Okay, at least she is probably going to do something now that her child has been hurt.' which is also what Lily foolishly though as her mother doesn't tell her to tell the truth, she tells her to lie and say that she slipped on some ice. Like the final straw, it was probably at that exact moment that all love she had for her mother as her protector, as her caregiver, vanished and was instead replaced by resentment.

Back to the relationship between her and Ryle, even when she starts getting infatuated with him, and tells Alyssa how fast they are moving because he is going to come with her to a restaurant and meet her mother, Alyssa doesn't seem to share her excitement or even pretend to think that is a good thing. I think this only further shows how Lily is letting herself get too swept up in the relationship because she is finally receiving some attention from someone not named Atlas, who she hasn't seen for many years, and it is something that she doesn't know how to deal with. She is too naive and too willing to trust people are good, not even taking the hints and signs from his own sister that dating him might not be the best move. You'd have assumed that after she had started reading the diaries again she would look back on her relationship with Atlas and realise how much of a solid foundation that had, even if they never clarified their relationship like she and Ryle hadn't, but she didn't and instead just moved on as if there was nothing wrong.

Their relationship does seem to be going really well between the two of them when they are together (they don't have much time together, and haven't even been on a date) but at the restaurant she sees Atlas working as a waiter. He tells her that he was in the military for eight years, which means he only got out when she first met Ryle and her father died. Although she thinks she got over him, her words sound more like she is trying to convince herself that is the case, rather than it actually being the case. They are both in relationships, having found them around the same time, a year ago, and she starts to cry in her car after he tells her that he wishes they had met over a year ago, obviously implying that he hoped she wasn't seeing anyone.

However, as the diary entries keep increasing I slowly realised that while her and Atlas' relationship was more built on love, there was also the fact that she was fifteen and he was eighteen when they started whatever it was that they did. He also asked her when she was turning sixteen. This was definitely a bit creepy, but something about how hard life had been for him made the gap a little less weird, though it of course didn't absolve what he did.

One thing I always like to avoid doing in books is the mention of how happy it is when things are going really well. If this is done right at the end of the book it is clarification, but in the middle, or at the start, you just know something bad is going to happen really soon. So when Lily mentions, multiple times, how happy she is and how everything is going perfectly I started to cringe because then I knew that something was going to shatter this honeymoon phase that they were in with their relationship.

I cringed, even more, when I read the next few scenes, seeing how impulsive Ryle can really be and how irrational he can get when angry. It really shouldn't have been a surprise, considering how much anger we used on a chair when we first were introduced to him. I think the difference between him and a normal person, because almost everyone has hit an inanimate object, is that while a normal person might just kick it once and be done with it, their anger had dissipated, he continued after, letting the anger overwhelm him completely and then moving onto drug still even though at that point you'd assume his anger would have vanished. Flirting like they had done a lot before, Lily decided to try something different and invited him over on his day off, with the promise of food while only wearing an apron. He brings over some vintage wine, which she drinks a lot of and starts acting like a normal drunk. Getting very risky, like talking about how he fingers her while on a call with her mother and also laughing a lot when something bad happens like Ryle pulling a burned casserole out of the oven without wearing gloves. Laughter is a normal reaction for people who a drunk to a lot of things and isn't indicative of their real opinion but as with everything in his life, and also like I suspected, he lets things take him over too much and this time it was anger at something not aimed at him. He pushes Lily and she falls down hitting her head on the cabinet, although she doesn't know it at that moment, it is the first time she realises what her mother felt because instead of getting completely angry at him, after pushing him away from checking on her on the floor, she goes to check on him. She hopes he isn't like her father, but instead of just seeing the worry in his eyes she sees come panic as if he knows his career is going to be over if this is revealed. She dismisses those thoughts as, 'that was just a one-time mistake because he cares a lot about his career, right...?'

It might have been a one-time mistake, but hurting your partner in a fit of rage isn't something that you get another chance to rectify, but unfortunately Lily doesn't see it that way and although she knows that what he did was wrong, she sees her laughing while drunk as wrong even though she doesn't see it as bad as what Ryle did, she still excuses his behaviour to an extent. A lot of things that occur are so easy to overlook in a relationship as red flags but are then so easy to see once you're out of that relationship. I think the main thing that she overlooks when at dinner with Alyssa, Ryle and Marshall (Alyssa's husband) is that they are both not willing, to tell the truth about what happened and how she how the facial injury. I think if she resolved herself to tell the truth she'd realise just how bad it sounded, 'Hey Alyssa, I was drinking a lot of wine and Ryle burnt himself on the casserole dish which caused me to start laughing and because I was laughing Ryle pushed me really hard across the room which is how I got this injury." when said that like it sounds horrible, and it wasn't like I embellished anything. This perfectly encapsulates how people in an abusive relationship can start off thinking that everything isn't a big deal and before they know it their confidence is gone and they are being constantly abused by their partner. It is so easy to fall into this cycle but so hard to read about someone falling into it herself, even after she had disdain for her own mother for staying with an abusive man until he died.

At the restaurant they see Atlas who puts two and two together, having seen her and her mother being abused before, and having been horribly abused himself, he knows the signs. In fact, it's strange that more people didn't. One has a bruise on the corner of her eye and it is also swollen and the other has bandages around his hands. Of course, he didn't directly hit her, but the two injuries are linked in that one caused the other. He defends Lily by going after Ryle but they are eventually split up and Ryle thinks that Lily is cheating on him until she explains otherwise. His behaviour in the car, when he threatens to leave her as he didn't want drama in his life (the reason he didn't pursue relationships in the past) is very strange and almost like he was testing the waters on what he could get away with. She doesn't bite and calls his bluff to which he backs off and apologises. What probably would have happened if she had apologised was that he would have held it over her head, or at least that is the vibe I was getting from that interaction.

Atlas again shows his superior thoughtful ability as he ends up bringing her a present to the flower store, one that he bought three years prior, which is a book with Ellen Degeneres on the front (he also gives her his number in paper form at this time). It is also signed with words that he asked Ellen to write inside to which she starts 'fake' crying. Again, convincing herself that she doesn't still love him and isn't still hung up on him. She definitely isn't No way is that possible...sigh.

Ryle and Lily start moving really fast, and on the night that she meets his parents they decide to have a small little wedding in Vegas with only her mother, and then Ryle's family. As always, when things look like they are going swimmingly something has to come down and ruin it, and as it was in the past, Ryle is the person that decides that he is going to be a massive c*** and ruin everything. He finds the paper in the back of the phone with Atlas's number on it and he calls it, wondering who it was. Once he finds out it is Atlas, he doesn't do something that a normal reasonable person would do and confront the person about maybe cheating, no, he does the exact opposite and assumes she is and then pushes her down some stairs in another fit of rage. Although the first time she should have definitely broken up with him, I can understand why she was willing to give him a second chance even if I disagree with it, the second time there is no room for argument and everyone knows it is wrong to give them another chance but when you're in that situation it is extremely hard to convince yourself that the other person is going to do it again. They will shower you with love and affection to make up for what they did, and while that looks nice on the surface there is always a hidden agenda, especially when he tells her that she fell down some stairs while we, and she, knows he pushed her. She does the right thing, feels the hurt and kicks out him and doesn't give him a chance to talk to her because he doesn't deserve one.

When she arrives at the flower shop, after getting a new phone and Alyssa calling her, she sees both Ryle and Alyssa there and waiting and although Alyssa already knows that it was Ryle who caused her injuries she acts like that while Ryle has done something wrong, he has a way of explaining it away. That way turns out to be that he was the one who accidentally killed his older brother by shooting him six times while he was still extremely young. This is a trauma. It is an explanation for his behaviour but it doesn't excuse any of it at all. The only reason he is telling Lily is to make her feel pity towards him in hopes that she will forgive him and give him another chance. She shouldn't but after learning everything I currently know about where Colleen Hoover is taking this story, I think we can all guess what she does next, even before it happens.

She doesn't think that what he did was bad, which of course it was, but she is comparing what he did to her to what her father did to her mother which is not something you do. Not only does abuse come in all shapes and sizes but one thing that she misses in all this, is that she doesn't know how her father treated her mother before she was born. Maybe the compassion was still there and he lost it sometime after she was born. We don't know, we will never know, but we do know that what he did to her was abuse. And it doesn't stop there.

Later on, he buys an apartment without her knowledge and although she likes it she is a bit miffed that he did it without consulting her first. There is also the fact that she is trying to work through his behaviour with him, and give him another chance and it looks like it is working. In the first fight they have, he ends up breaking a vase and instead of the usual, going off at her, like he had done before he walks out of the apartment and calms down before coming back and agreeing with her side of the argument. At least, up until then, it looks like everything is going swimmingly because shortly after they have another fight that starts after he reads all her diaries, which she doesn't know at the time, and he also starts drinking whiskey which is the worst combination. He grabs her, annoyed and hurts her with how hard his grip is. He bites deep into her shoulder, leaving marks, and when she tries to get away he pins her down underneath him on the bed, proclaiming how he doesn't think that he has shown her that he is better than Atlas so he is going to show her he loves her more and looking like he is going to rape her. He headbutts her after she bites his tongue though and when he is asleep calls Atlas. He saves her and takes her to the hospital where she finds she is pregnant, but there is more to it than that as you can't get over someone you love that quickly.

It was incredibly hard reading about how she loves him, hates him for ruining everything they had, loves him more and is disgusted with herself for trying to find ways that what he did wasn't that bad. Eventually, she speaks with her mother who tells her not to take him back and make the same mistake she did.

There are many times when it looks like she is going to take him back, but reminders of that one night plague her thoughts and rightfully stop her. It isn't until her daughter is born while Ryle is there that she asks for a divorce, listing everything he did to her, and what would he say to their daughter if she came to him and told him that a boy was doing that with her. It was the final straw and he understood.

Later, 11 months to be exact, Lily encounters Atlas, who she had told she needed space from, and after dropping Emerson, her child, to Ryle she runs back to him and they start what could have, should have, started long ago. Their lives together and since they already know everything about the other they know they fit together perfectly.

I definitely recommend this book.

9/10