🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Unraveling yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Okay so this one. This one was a lot. Vi Keeland builds the whole thing in two timelines — present day and flashbacks, doling out information piece by piece so you never quite have the full picture until it’s right in front of you. A psychiatrist obsessing over a man whose family was killed by her late husband. A woman who follows a stranger in the street before he ever becomes her patient. And by the end you realize almost nothing was what it looked like from the start.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Before: Connor
The past timeline gives us Meredith’s marriage to Connor in pieces. He’s a hockey player. He gets hurt. He starts drinking, gets meaner, angrier. He wanted to start a family before the injury and is furious when she goes back on the pill without telling him. She overhears him at the doctor’s office pushing for more painkillers and starts to worry he’s abusing them.
After a big fight one night, Connor shows up with flowers, admits he lied to her about quitting the painkillers, and they make up. That day she’s about to leave the office and her assistant asks her to fill out a prescription for a client. She goes to grab her prescription pad and it’s gone. Connor took it. And then, he’s in a car accident. He hits two pedestrians. Both of them die. Connor dies too.
At his funeral, detectives show up asking about prescriptions. Turns out he had filled 22 prescriptions for himself using her stolen pad, all under her name. She suspected, but didn’t know for sure until now. Her lawyer negotiates it down to a one-year suspension and mandatory counseling. She accepts it without much fight because she feels responsible — people are dead and her husband was the reason, and somehow that feels like it’s on her too. Even when the detective she goes to see after her hearing tells her straight out: Connor had severe deterioration in both knees from years of damage. The prescriptions weren’t outside what a normal treatment plan might look like. Let go of the guilt or it will eat you alive.
She doesn’t let go of the guilt.
She Sees Him
Present day. Meredith is out one day and she sees Gabriel Wright. She knows who he is — the man whose wife and daughter were killed in the same accident that killed Connor. She needs to know where he’s going. What he’s doing. Is he happy? He looks happy… She follows him. Then she follows him again. She learns his entire schedule. She goes to her own therapy sessions and admits she’s been following Gabriel. He visits a storage unit every single day, she tells her therapist. What kind of person visits a storage unit every day? This is just spiraling her further.
And then, the day she’s back at her office getting ready to see her very first patient in over a year — a package arrives. A book about a man who stalks women. Her name on the label, but the suite number is wrong. She has no idea where it came from. That same day, her admin tells her there’s a last-minute new client. Gabriel Wright.
She knows she absolutely cannot take him on as a patient. But she does it anyway — she just can’t help herself.
Gabriel as a Patient
Gabriel says he’s there because he can’t sleep. His sister thinks he never properly grieved his wife and daughter and is only now working through it. He was supposed to be with them that night. There had been marital problems, a lot of fighting. He admits he’d followed his wife because he thought she was having an affair. Meredith is sitting across from him taking session notes while knowing she’s been following him around the city. She finally tells her therapist about everything. I seriously can’t believe she is admitting all this to any living person — and yet here she is.
To fill the rest of her time she starts talking to Robert on a dating app. She likes him. A new patient also comes in: Rebecca Jordan. She seems weirdly familiar. Rebecca is one of those people who goes all in on relationships fast — if you like each other, why not move in together?
Trying to End It
Meredith eventually refers Gabriel to another doctor. First attempt to cut it off. She goes on her date with Robert. Gabriel shows up at the restaurant and comes directly to their table. He says he missed a call from her office — is everything okay? She says yes and leaves the date early. Walks home feeling like someone is following her, she freaks, jumps into a cab, can’t see who it was.
The next day her admin tells her Gabriel’s appointment has been canceled. Good. Done. And then he shows up at the office at the end of the day. He tells her she’s the first person he’s connected to since losing his wife and daughter. He begs for a few more sessions. So she gives in — how could she not help him after everything that’s happened?
In those sessions he tells her all his codes are his wife’s birthday. He admits his wife was a student at his university when they met. He was her teacher. Getting creepier…
The Appointment She Should Have Never Let Happen
Eventually she decides enough is enough. She’s going to end it. At that appointment, instead of the clean exit she planned, Gabriel tells her he’s into her. That he tried being with someone else but couldn’t stop thinking about her. And she sleeps with him. She is his therapist. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She does it anyway. The therapist is not okay.
During these later sessions, Rebecca’s sessions are also filling in a picture. She’s having relationship trouble because she’s into breath play and her new boyfriend isn’t. Her ex — the one she’s obsessed with — was married and was going to leave his wife for her. When Meredith sleeps with Gabriel, she also engages in breath play. If it worked for Rebecca, maybe it will make it better for her too… The Rebecca parallels are building without her even seeing it yet.
The Spiral
Gabriel cancels his next appointment. Meredith falls apart. Rebecca comes in and announces she broke up with the new boyfriend because he wouldn’t do the breath play with her, and keeps going back to talking about how great her ex was. Gabriel cancels for the second week in a row so Meredith goes to his building. No lights on. She calls him anonymously to see if he’ll turn them on. Nothing. She takes that as proof he really is out of town. Then he rounds the corner from across the street. He says his plans changed, he just got back — and he invites her up. They sleep together again. Once things finally come into focus she panics and runs.
She runs right past the storage unit. Remembers he told her his pin was his wife’s birthday. She uses it. Inside she finds kid stuff — and then a keychain. One she had made for Connor with his jersey number and a special inscription on it. A keychain she lost the day she bumped into Gabriel at a coffee shop. It’s in his storage unit. He has it. He has known exactly who she is this entire time.
She thought she was the one watching him. She walks out of the storage unit and hears someone behind her.
Everything Unravels
She cancels all of Gabriel’s appointments and checks into a hotel. She is too freaked out to go home. He shows up at her work anyway. She agrees to meet him at a bar to find out what his game is, then changes her mind and tells him they’re done. He keeps trying to contact her. She’s walking miles through the city going in circles and ends up at her own therapist’s office, where she admits she slept with a patient.
The next morning she goes down for coffee and sees Gabriel coming into her building. She hides in the elevator. Goes back up to her office but forgot to lock the outer door. She knows she has Rebecca scheduled. She can hear Rebecca in the lobby calling hello, hello — and then Gabriel walks in and says to Rebecca: what the hell are you doing here? He calls her a name. You’re stalking me again, aren’t you? These two have a whole history Meredith knew nothing about.
The Reveal
Gabriel finally admits: it wasn’t his wife who was cheating. It was Gabriel. He was sleeping with Rebecca. His wife found out. He tried to break it off with Rebecca. She made his life hell. And that was the night everything exploded — the night Connor’s car hit his family.
Meredith calls her assistant and they meet up. Her assistant tells her she saw Rebecca Jordan following Meredith one day, weaving in and out. So maybe it wasn’t just Gabriel watching her all this time. Maybe it was Rebecca too.
She goes to the police about a restraining order. The detective recognizes Rebecca’s name immediately — she was the witness who saw Connor hit Gabriel’s family. And Connor had told Meredith that Rebecca was the reason he wasn’t with his family when they got killed. He lied.
Rebecca then shows up at Meredith’s office. She tells her: she told Gabriel’s wife about the affair. Gabriel was going to do everything to win her back. She couldn’t allow that. She was standing on the street watching Connor’s car swerve, and she pushed Gabriel’s wife into the road. Didn’t mean to push the daughter too. Then she calmly reminds Meredith about doctor-patient confidentiality. You can’t say a word.
Meredith goes to the police anyway. Breaks it. Tells the detective that Rebecca admitted to killing Gabriel’s family. Rebecca gets arrested, confesses on tape, and gives detailed accounts of every time she’d been following Meredith — since the previous fall. She eventually just rocks back and forth saying Thailand, Thailand, Thailand.
Gabriel is also questioned. They can’t find any evidence of involvement.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥🔥 / 5 — Four flames. There are explicit scenes between Meredith and Gabriel, with the added layer that she’s his therapist and knows it the whole time. The breath play also comes into the picture, filtered through Rebecca’s sessions and then Meredith’s own choices. It’s not fluffy. If any of that content isn’t for you, worth knowing going in.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Somewhere between both. Meredith is told she’ll likely lose her license for breaking confidentiality without being directly threatened. She lets go of her apartment and starts over. Gabriel shows up while she’s moving out and thanks her for being willing to testify. She asks why he went to the storage unit every day. He says he put his daughter’s things in there. He went back to visit them.
Time passes. She’s doing better, teaching as an adjunct professor, moving forward. And Gabriel is following her. Everywhere.
Then he drops Thai money out of his pocket in public. A stranger picks it up. Says it looks like monopoly money — is that Thailand money? Gabriel says yeah, he’s going right away. It was supposed to be a reward for a job well done. But now he’s going alone.
And there it is. He wanted his family gone. He likely planted the idea in Rebecca’s head — that if she did it, they’d disappear to Thailand together. She was obsessively in love with him, she believed it, she did it. And when she went to prison, she rocked back and forth saying Thailand over and over. That was the deal she thought they had made.
The twist is effective. That final piece dropping into place the way it does is a genuinely good moment. What doesn’t hold up cleanly is Gabriel claiming he sought out Meredith specifically to make her suffer for what Connor did — because she had nothing to do with the accident, and he apparently wanted his family dead anyway. That thread doesn’t fully connect, and you close the book going wait, but… rather than oh my god. Satisfying enough — just not airtight.
Would I Relisten?
No. This was a wild ride and it was enough for one time.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Gabriel. The whole time. He wasn’t a grieving father — or at least, not only that. He recruited a woman obsessed with him to kill the family he wanted out of, promised her Thailand as payment, and sat in Meredith’s therapy office for weeks knowing exactly who she was and what he was doing. That takes a second to really sink in.
Who Is This For
This one is for readers who like their thrillers messy and their protagonists deeply, complicatedly flawed. Meredith makes choices throughout this book that will make you want to shake her, and the book doesn’t clean her up. If you love psychological suspense with a layered dual-timeline structure and a solid twist at the center — and you don’t need every thread perfectly tied off — you’ll likely enjoy this one. If you need characters to make rational decisions, maybe sit this one out.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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🎧 | Genre: Psychological Thriller | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥