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Chapter 23
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in It Ends with Us, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cycles of Abuse
Naked Truths
Good and Evil
Chosen Family
Summary
Analysis
At the hospital, Atlas watches the nurse attending to Lily. Lily notices the nurse’s expression as she stitches her cut and cleans the bite mark on her heart tattoo. The nurse asks Atlas to leave so that she can ask Lily confidential questions, but Lily assures her it wasn’t Atlas who hurt her. The nurse lets him stay. She asks Lily if she was raped, explaining that there is an exam they will conduct, if so. Lily tells her that she wasn’t and doesn’t want the exam. Atlas encourages her to do it, but Lily refuses. A doctor comes in to tell her that he wants to run a CT scan in case she has a concussion, but he won’t because she’s pregnant. Lily breaks into sobs, blaming herself. She declines further care and asks to leave. In the car, she reminds herself to “just keep swimming.”
Lily chooses to forgo a rape exam for multiple reasons: her compulsion to protect Ryle, her own confusion about what happened, and her aversion to undergoing any more invasive, traumatic interaction that day. Lily’s experience demonstrates how many difficult decisions survivors of domestic violence are forced to make, none of which are without complications. Those outside these situations, like the ER nurse in this novel, may disagree with the choices a survivor makes for themselves, but only survivors know their own needs and experience. The biggest complication of all for Lily—and that which will define how she navigates her situation for the rest of the novel—is the news that she is pregnant with Ryle’s baby.
Themes
Atlas takes Lily back to his place, a house in the suburbs of Boston. As the drive through the neighborhood, Lily wonders about his girlfriend, Cassie, and what she will think about him bringing Lily home. She worries that Cassie will want to know why she didn’t leave Ryle earlier, the same way Lily wondered why her mother stayed with her father. Lily wishes that people blamed the correct people: abusive men. When they arrive, Lily is relieved that there is no other car parked in front of the house or in the garage.
Prior to Ryle’s latest attack, Lily didn’t think of their relationship as abusive or of herself as a victim. After the previous night, however, her perception of herself and her marriage shifts. Now that Lily sees herself as a survivor of abuse, she begins to worry about all the judgments people have against women in situations like hers. She is keenly aware of these criticisms because she harbored them against her own mother. Lily’s personal experience reframes her understanding of her parents’ marriage, and she realizes that she has thought of her mother far more critically than she ever did her father, whom she simply wrote off as a lost cause.
Themes
Lily is in awe of Atlas’s home. The teal color of the kitchen reminds her of a tropical ocean, and she thinks to herself that Atlas kept swimming after he left Maine and didn’t stop until he reached the Caribbean. Lily asks him if he lives alone, and he nods. Atlas makes the bed in the spare room for Lily while she showers. In the bathroom, she vomits from the trauma of the night. When she emerges, she sees that Atlas left her a pair of his pajamas. She cries herself to sleep.
Lily has come to associate Atlas with the sea in multiple ways: in their shared encouragement to keep swimming through hardships, as well as in her vision of him as a wave that rocked and realigned her shores. She is not surprised, then, to find that his house is decorated in the relaxing shades of the ocean. Atlas continues to be a calming force in her life, but not even the comfort of her friend can erase what Ryle has done to her.
Themes
