53 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca YarrosThe Things We Leave Unfinished
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 28-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “May 1942”
Scarlett and Jameson make love as their parting draws hear. Jameson wants her to take his phonograph with her, and Scarlett insists he must bring it himself. Jameson and his squadron are flying back from a mission in Germany and are over the Netherlands when German fighters attack. Jameson is hit and goes down. He asks Howard to tell Scarlett he loves her.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Noah”
Noah examines the documents he has found and misses Georgia. His sister Adrienne brings him coffee. She reminds Noah that he lives in the real world where he can’t script a grand gesture, telling him that relationships require work, and people make mistakes. Georgia texts to say she read both endings and he should go with the real one, adding that he shouldn’t “[…] doubt [his] ability to rip someone’s heart out” (360). Noah decides to prove that he loves her.
Chapter 30 Summary: “May 1942”
Scarlett is working on a story when she hears a knock at the door. She sees Jameson’s squadron on her doorstep and steels herself, asking if Jameson is dead. Howard says he went down on the coast of the Netherlands. Scarlett asks them to find him. Constance arrives and consoles Scarlett, who is numb with shock.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Noah”
Adam, who is with Noah at a party, says Noah can’t get in the way of Scarlett Stanton’s happy ending. Noah likes the happy ending better as well, but he is sticking with what Georgia wants. Damian Ellsworth greets him, and Noah hides his disgust long enough to get information. He learns that Scarlett met Brian in the 1950s, but said she couldn’t marry Brian when her first marriage didn’t feel over. Adam wonders why Scarlett suddenly decided in 1973 to have Jameson declared dead. Noah informs Damian that he, Noah, loves Georgia and that Damian will never get the film rights to the novel. He tells Adam he thinks the person Georgia loved most lied to her Georgia’s entire life, but he needs more information to be sure.
Chapter 32 Summary: “June 1942”
Constance helps Scarlett pack, insisting she must leave Ipswich with Vernon, reminding her of her promise to Jameson to keep William safe. Scarlett hasn’t given up hope that Jameson will be found. Constance packs the typewriter with Scarlett’s stories and the record player.
As she, William, and Constance head toward the airfield to meet Vernon, bombs begin to fall. They run for the air-raid shelter when a bomb falls. Scarlett returns to consciousness feeling cold and dizzy. She finds Constance with rubble atop her and fears her sister is dead.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Georgia”
Georgia writes a check from Scarlett’s literacy foundation to a library in Idaho, feeling proud of her work. She misses Noah. Damian shows up at her door with pink roses and wishes her a happy seventh wedding anniversary. He wants the movie rights to The Things We Left Unfinished, the name of the new book. He’s also realized that when Georgia signed over their production company, he lost the rights to five other Scarlett Stanton books that he thought he had. Georgia refuses to be taken in. Hazel enters and shows Georgia the advance press about the book. Reviewers are skewering Noah for ruining Scarlett’s story, giving her a sad ending. Georgia feels terrible that she might have injured his career, but she is also happy that Noah kept his promise. Hazel tells Georgia to apologize and stop standing in her own way. A courier delivers a package from Gran, and Georgia gives the courier Damian’s roses. Gran’s packet contains instructions on where to find the unfinished manuscript, the packet of letters, and a third letter, which Georgia is to read after she’s read the others. Gran asks Georgia’s forgiveness for the lie.
Chapter 34 Summary: “June 1942”
Scarlett shakes Constance and is overjoyed when she wakes. They both realize Scarlett is bleeding from a wound. Scarlett collapses and asks Constance to get William to Vernon. Scarlett’s last word before she dies is Jameson’s name.
Constance holds William, bewildered as emergency workers approach the wreckage. The men take Scarlett’s body and Constance gives them her handbag. She drives to meet Vernon, who thinks Constance is Scarlett. Constance realizes she has Scarlett’s bag with her visa and ID. She realizes the best way to protect William is to go with him, so she lets everyone believe she is Scarlett. The scar on her palm from their childhood blood oath serves as proof.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Georgia”
Georgia is stunned as she reads the last letter from the woman she now realizes was Constance. The letter explains that when she arrived in the US, Constance saw the name Constance Wadsworth in a report of the death toll from the bombing. She realized she could stay with William and not go back to Henry. She grieves for Scarlett, but Jameson’s family accepts her and encourages her to start writing. Constance began finishing Scarlett’s stories, imagining what she would write, but in time, she began writing her own. Then she met Brian and fell in love. She refused his offer of marriage until she learned Henry had died and felt free to marry again, and she truly loved Brian. She asks Georgia to understand that Ava was destroyed by the death of her parents. William and Hannah truly loved each other, too, and Ava never recovered from losing them. Constance reminds Georgia that she came from a lineage of love—Scarlett and Jameson’s love, which was “one of those fated lightning strikes, miraculous” (408). Georgia compares the picture of Scarlett and Jameson in uniform to photographs of Gran and can see the difference. She calls Adam, who says Noah is on a research trip, and asks to talk to Noah’s publisher.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Noah”
Noah lands from his research trip and is astonished to hear people praising the book, everyone from his mom to the New York Times. Noah fears he has been double-crossed until Adam informs him that Georgia requested the change to the ending.
Chapter 37 Summary: “Georgia”
Georgia opens her door to find Noah standing there. He asks why she changed the ending, and she says it was because she loves him and couldn’t see his career suffer while she dragged out forgiveness. Noah kisses her and then shares the results of his research. Jameson’s wreck was located, and they found a ring inscribed “to J from S.” Georgia confirms that Constance wrote the Scarlett Stanton books. They decide they will live in Colorado for most of the year and spend the fall months in New York.
Chapter 38 Summary: “August 1944”
This chapter gives Noah’s happy ending, showing Scarlett and Jameson reuniting in Poplar Grove, Colorado. Jameson explains that he was a prisoner of war and then helped with the Dutch Resistance for a time, but he is home now.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Georgia”
Three years later, Georgia is looking fondly at Noah and Scarlett’s book in the bookstore while Noah sets up for a book signing. She is pregnant and enjoying her own epic love story.
Chapters 28-39 Analysis
There’s a great deal of action packed into the last act of the book, as Yarros sets up for the plot twist that will upend expectations but also make it possible for both love stories, which were thrown into doubt in the previous section, to have happy endings.
Up to this point, it seems that Scarlett and Jameson did not have a life together in Colorado, but Yarros keeps the suspense going until just before the anticipated moment of separation. This enhances the level of drama and the shock of loss when Jameson is shot down. She keeps the suspense high with Scarlett’s belief that Jameson is missing. The tension peaks when an air raid begins just as it looks like Scarlett will get to safety. The loss of Constance, a fake death, as it were, seems like yet another unbearable blow to the grieving Scarlett.
Yarros sets up the surprise, however, in the discussion between Noah and Damian at the New York party. While Noah has connected the dots, the text itself has also mentioned Gran’s marriage to Brian. Portrayals in popular culture tend to portray “true” love as a once-in-a-lifetime event, a nearly magical connection—Constance calls it a fated lightning strike—with a person who can never be replaced in the lover’s life or heart. This kind of love comes only once in a lifetime, or so the convention says. Georgia and Noah, in order to find this love with one another, cannot have felt it for another person before, and their backgrounds uphold this pattern. Noah has never seriously been in love—Georgia is his first, his one and only. And Georgia’s marriage was not love but infatuation that was strained by Damian’s infidelities and then held together by grit and ice in the later years.
Noah has changed, however, in falling in love with Georgia, and making her one of the people, like his family members, to whom he always keeps his promises. Georgia symbolically heals by reclaiming her artistic passion, glass making, and also, more literally, by taking back the movie rights to Gran’s books, which are her property as the executor of the literary estate. In serving Damian justice for his betrayal, she is freed from that relationship and able to move on, a feeling that is captured in her giving away Damian’s roses. Georgia reclaims her life in another sense when she learns the truth about Gran’s identity. Instead of this lie feeling like a betrayal, Georgia understands the choice was made out of love. She is even able to better understand her mother when Gran urges to consider her mother’s heartbreak after losing her parents, thus highlighting Georgia’s love for Gran, whether she is Constance or Scarlett.
The two possible endings to Scarlett’s book serve as a device to create conflict and tension between Noah and Georgia, but here, the change in endings confirms the change in Georgia’s beliefs and values. She feels gratified by the sad ending because it shows Noah kept his promise, but she also understands, once she sees the reviews, how deeply this violation of convention harms the beliefs that readers hold about romance and the comfort and satisfaction they find in these books. A sad ending to an epic romance is a betrayal of the worst kind, and Georgia has insisted upon it, to the harm of Noah’s career. When she truly understands, through Constance’s story, the sacrifices people make for love, Georgia can finally see beyond her own needs to what will be best for Noah. This is, in terms of the romance story, her grand gesture that shows her love and commitment, proves she has changed, and signals to her beloved that she is ready for their happy ending.
Gran and Ava are foils throughout the book, both of them acting as opposing mother figures for Georgia. Georgia understands this in a new way when she realizes what Constance sacrificed. Constance lost or gave up everything she had to keep her promise to protect William. She lost Edward, she lost her sister, and she left her childhood home, parents, and memories to fly William to safety. She also found safety of her own in escaping Henry Wadsworth. The gazebo she helps Jameson’s family build, which earlier appeared to be a symbol of Scarlett and Jameson’s connection, becomes instead a symbol of Constance’s rebuilt life, fashioned by her own hands—a borrowed name, but an identify she makes her own by rewriting Scarlett’s stories. In this different light, Constance writing in the gazebo is not a bereaved lover waiting for her lost one but a woman who has suffered and won through enjoying a career she has made her own, on the property she bought, in the shelter she built from the wreckage, and the next orphaned child she has adopted. The gazebo can also be read as a tribute to herself that simultaneously honors Scarlett and Jameson; indeed, in her hesitance to finish the manuscript, the choice between giving her sister and her brother-in-law a happy ending, as was her brand, and telling the truth is clearly difficult to make. Both the manuscript and the gazebo serve as more permanent demonstrations of love, as Constance has seen firsthand that people themselves can be lost through no choice of their own. Roses, gazebos, and manuscripts, however, can last, as can the memory of love.
While Ava is broken by the loss of her parents, Constance remains loving and nurturing, still believing in the happy endings that she writes again and again for her characters. She finds love again with Brian. This is another love she loses, yet she never becomes bitter, as proven by the garden she continues to nurture. Constance tells Georgia she is born from love, referring to William, Georgia’s grandfather, but in truth, the shaping influence of Georgia’s life is Constance, and she is a positive embodiment of Family Loyalties. This realization impacts Georgia’s character arc, allowing her to choose Constance’s model of generous love—not Ava’s model of brittle, self-interested coldness. The productiveness of this choice is indicated by her pregnancy at the end, where the happy ending imagined by Noah gives Scarlett and Jameson the chance to be together, too.
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