The Unraveling (spoilers and ending explained) | Vi Keeland

This review contains spoilers for the ending of The Unraveling by Vi Keeland. If you are looking for a spoiler-free review, I’ve got that covered over on the main page!

This is quite a book! I wasn’t expecting to sucked in so quickly, but I can’t resist a slightly unhinged narrator and Meredith is teetering on the edge of unhinged and wading into the wrong side of good judgment.

What is The Unraveling about?

The story centers around psychiatrist Meredith McCall who lives and practices in New York City. It was only two years ago that Meredith was happily married to an NHL hockey player named Connor and the two were planning to start a family. But an injury led Connor to require pain medications that eventually led to struggles with addiction when he’s trying to ween off. Then, a tragic accident leads everything to fall apart.

In the present, Meredith is picking up the pieces of her life. She’s begun mandatory therapy as part of the conditions to start her psychiatric practice back up. Her marriage is over and she’s slowly thinking about dating. And she’s lightly stalking Gabriel Wright. It frustrated Meredith that Gabriel seems to be doing so well after the tragedy that changed both of their lives when she is not. She starts following him—only sometimes—and observing his life. He meets with women, he teaches at a university, and he stops by a storage facility regularly.

But when Gabriel Wright unexpectedly walks into her psychiatry practice, Meredith is stunned. He seems to have no clue who she is, and genuinely is seeking therapy. Meredith knows it’s unethical to treat him—especially without disclosing their connection—but she can’t seem to turn him away. As she continues to see him, her life unravels. Could things get any worse? In this case, they can and they do…

What happened two years ago?

Two years ago, Connor was struggling with opiate addiction after a hockey injury had him on presecription pills. He becomes angry, combative, and difficult—a different man than Meredith married. When she discusses his addiction, he swears he will stop the pills. One night he’s out driving and he strikes a woman and her daughter with his car—those are Gabriel’s wife and child. They both die, and when Meredith goes to the hospital to see him, she’s told Connor died in the crash as well. This is a shocking twist for the reader because we are led to believe they are divorced. It’s the beginning of Meredith burying what is happening and we learn she’s not truly being honest with the reader at all times.

Why is Meredith on probation with her medical license and practice?

After Meredith finds out that Connor didin’t survive the crash, the doctor tells Meredith that Connor tested positive for Opiates. Meredith thought Connor had stopped taking opiates, but the police ask her if she was prescribing them for her husband. Meredith is bewildered and denies it until she remembers that one of her prescription pads went missing. Connor had been writing prescriptions for himself from Meredith’s prescription pad. Her attorney thinks she can fight any penalty from the board since Meredith wasn’t actually the one prescribing them, but Meredith feels guilty about what happened to Gabriel’s family, and tells her lawyer to accept the punishment.

Does Gabriel know who Meredith is?

When Gabriel walks into Meredith’s office, she can’t figure out if he knows who she is. She’s using her maiden name, so it’s not clear who her husband was. As their sessions progress, things get increasingly inappropriate. At one point Meredith tries to tell him he can’t be her patient, but caves when he asks for a few more sessions. Eventually, their relationship progresses to having sex—the rough kind. Meredith becomes more obsessed and can’t seem to extricate herself.

One day, Meredith is walking her old stalking route from Gabriel’s apartment to the storage unit when she runs into him on the street. She mumbles an excuse about a cell phone store and Gabriel asks if it is the Verizon store on the corner. They go back to his place to have sex, but afterwards Meredith flees. She realizes there is no Verizon store where Gabriel ran into her. Gabriel knew Meredith was lying, but what does it all mean?

Meredith breaks into Gabriel’s storage unit, desperate to see what he is hiding there. But the unit is full of his daughter’s belongings. Meredith is about to leave, realizing there is nothing nefarious in the storage unit until she discovers a key chain sitting on top. It’s the custom one she made Connor as a gift years ago. She lost it the day she first ran into Gabriel. Suddenly, Meredith realizes that Gabriel has known exactly who she was the entire time. So then, who was stalking who? Meredith thought she was stalking Gabriel, but perhaps he was the one stalking her?

Who is Rebecca?

Meredith has another new patient that she meets right after reopening her practice. Rebecca is young and pretty, and she describes an ex-boyfriend who she’s essentially stalking because she doesn’t want to let him go. Over time, she describes more about this boyfriend, including the particularly exciting way he has sex. Meredith begins to take things Rebecca says and act them out as fantasies in her own life with Gabriel. Eventually, she realizes that Rebecca is much more messed up than she realizes.

Meanwhile, Meredith becomes increasingly paranoid that someone is following her, so she starts staying at her office. One evening Gabriel comes to see her at her office, and Rebecca enters at the same time. She can hear them in the outer hallway surprised and unhappy to see one another. It turns out that Gabriel was the ex-boyfriend Rebecca was stalking, and she was also stalking Meredith once she saw Meredith stalking Gabriel (what a tangled web…). Gabriel admits that Rebecca was his student and that it wasn’t his wife who cheated, it was him. Rebecca spiraled when he broke it off with her, and went to his wife to tell her everything. Gabriel’s wife was out the night of the accident with their daughter because of what Rebecca told her.

How does it end?

Meredith tries to get a restraining order against Rebecca and Gabriel, but she struggles because she can’t admit they are her patients. The detective tells her the name is familiar, and that Rebecca is the witness who fingered Connor as the cause of the crash. She was at the scene of the accident. One night Rebecca talks her way back into Meredith’s office and reveals that she was following Gabriel’s wife that night and was upset Gabriel wouldn’t leave her, so Rebecca pushed Gabriel’s in front of Connor’s car. She pulled her daughter with her, and that was how the two died. Meredith can’t tell the police about the confession because of doctor-patient confidentiality. Meredith decides she can’t live without getting justice, so she breaks confidentiality and tells the detective. Rebecca is convicted of the murders. At the trial, her attorney tries to get her off on an insanity plea, but they think Rebecca is faking it. She kept rocking back and forth muttering “Thailand”, which made no sense. Gabriel says that he got the keychain by accident—it got caught on his coat. He didn’t realize who Meredith was until later.

In the epilogue, it’s one year later and Gabriel is narrating instead of Meredith. She has been forced to leave psychiatry and is teaching at a university. She sold her apartment and moved to Brooklyn. Gabriel spends most days stalking Meredith, and making up cues that she still wants to be with him (such as naming her dog Romeo when he teaches Shakespeare…). In the final scene, Gabriel drops something. The man returning it to him asks if it is Thai currency, and Gabriel says yes and that he is traveling there next week. The man asks if he is taking anyone and Gabriel says no. Gabriel says he was supposed to take someone to Thailand as a reward for a job well done, but she is no longer available.

So…what did that ending mean?

Keeland writes in a way that leaves room for interpretation. We are definitely led to infer that Rebecca was the person Gabriel means in regards to the Thailand trip. This also explains why she kept muttering that at the trial. Further, we know he was planning it to reward Rebecca for “a job well done”. Here’s where I think we need to draw inferences based on the broader plot–what exactly is he rewarding Rebecca for? My take was that Gabriel convinced Rebecca to kill his wife, which Rebecca did by shoving her. We know from Rebecca that she only recently broke up with Gabriel when she started seeing Meredith. However, in retrospect, I don’t think they ever broke up. Gabriel was using Rebecca to get Meredith in bed with him. Once Gabriel met Meredith, he became obsessed with her. It’s clear he actually was stalking Meredith before, though he convinced her that he wasn’t. Meanwhile, he needed to get rid of Rebecca after she served her purpose, so he convinced her to confess to Meredith. Meredith turned her over to the police which wasn’t in his plans, and she moved. Gabriel is back to stalking Meredith.

I realize that this is inferring more than what was explicitly stated, but I feel that is the implication. Essentially, it’s confirming all of the things Meredith suspected but then Gabriel talked himself out of. The last scene is eerie—it’s the first time we are in Gabriel’s head and he is one twisted man. The way Keeland writes it, it’s clear Gabriel is embodying Joe Goldberg from You. He uses the same iconic inner monologue, narrating directly to “you” (Meredith). He watches her laughing and walking. He wondered who she’s talking to that made her laugh. He thinks she is teasing him with her dog named after an obscure connection to Gabriel. It’s so unhinged! Meredith isn’t the nuttiest one in the book, it seems. She’s not even in the top two!

What did I think overall?

This book sucked me right in. I love an unhinged narrator, and to be honest I felt Meredith could have been even more unhinged! Meredith is a classic unreliable narrator who the reader is led to doubt, but ultimately ends up being more reliable than we gave her credit for. She spirals, obsessing over Gabriel. But she also seems confused—it’s accidental how she stumbled across him. Or is it? We later realize Gabriel was stalking her and it lured her in. Meredith also spirals into heavy drinking as a coping strategy—another hallmark of an unreliable narrator. She abandons a great guy she’s dating because she can’t stop thinking about Gabriel. Meredith is unraveling, as the title implies.

I loved the twists at the end, and that Keeland didn’t over explain what happened. The brevity of that last twist made it so deliciously vague. The impact is in the power of suggestion—I was left wondering when Gabriel first became aware of Meredith, and when his obsession started? Also how are we to unpack that everyone was stalking each other in this book. Meredith was stalking Gabriel, Rebecca was stalking Meredith, Gabriel was stalking Meredith, and Rebecca was stalking Gabriel. Is it stalking if they are all doing it to one another? What a delightful little thought exercise that is…

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