Verity: Team Letter or Team Manuscript?

(Spoilers Ahead)

Synopsis

Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish.

Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of what really happened the day her daughter died.

Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents would devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue to love her.

Thoughts

Verity by New York Times bestselling author, Colleen Hoover, is a psychological thriller which is very different from what Hoover usually writes. Like all of the novels I’ve read by her, I enjoyed this one but I was also confused and frustrated–in a good way–with how the novel ended.

Hoover is notorious for always including plot twists in her novels, and while Verity was full of them, the biggest plot twist comes at the end when Lowen finds the letter that Verity wrote to Jeremy with the “truth.” What’s so confusing and frustrating about the ending is that the readers don’t really know who to believe because as the novel escalates, all the characters become suspicious and untrustworthy.

Upon finishing the book, I sat with my thoughts for about 15 minutes contemplating the ending and deciding who I believed before I came to the conclusion that only one choice really made sense: team letter.

Based on what I’ve seen, team letter is a very unpopular opinion, and while that’s understandable, I have one major reason for believing that Verity was telling the truth in the letter rather than in the manuscript.  

Verity wrote the letter for Jeremy and hid it in the floorboards, meaning Jeremy knew that he would be able to lift the floorboard and find the things that Verity hid in there. Lowen had no idea that the floorboard could lift until she remembered that she saw Verity kneeling on the floor through the security cameras. 

While it seems like it could’ve been staged by Verity, she wasn’t aware that when she was putting the letter in the floorboard, Lowen was watching, and when Lowen did find the letter, it was out of luck because she remembered that one detail.

If the letter was meant for Jeremy, why would Verity lie about what she claims happened? It would make sense if she had been aware that Lowen was watching her but at the moment, she wasn’t. This is my only reason for leaning more towards team letter, simply because of the fact that I don’t think Verity would stage a letter that claimed to be the truth if she wasn’t even sure that Lowen would be the one to find it.

Though I do lean more towards the letter as being the truth, I still find it hard to fully decide who’s really the villain and who’s really the protagonist, and I don’t condone any of the things that the characters did. It’s clear by the end of the novel that all three characters have done their fair share of evil deeds, and it’s also proven that Jeremy is a liar, and he manipulated and roped Lowen into believing that Verity wasn’t all he thought she was.

By the end, it’s hard to trust any of the characters because the readers have seen what they’re all capable of. The fact that Lowen helped Jeremy murder Verity and concocted a lie as to how she died for the media, makes her no better than either of them. It also seemed like Lowen was becoming more like Verity once her relationship with Jeremy started and she got pregnant.

Maybe in the end, Jeremy was the reason for all of the events–past and present–that occurred. It’s clear he was violent and got angry easily, and by the way that Lowen was beginning to change and become more like Verity, it seems like Jeremy negatively impacted her more than she ever expected. In the end, she’s scared that she can’t ever leave him because he could possibly do to her what he did to Verity, and that seems to give away a lot more about Jeremy and his character.