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Summary: Chapters 20-21 and So Be It Chapters 14-15
So Be It Chapter14
Verity recalls the day Harper dies, exactly six months after Chastin's death. Unhappy and looking for someone to blame, she believes Harper's lack of emotion about Chastin's passing stems from guilt. This makes Verity even more determined to eliminate her as a threat to the family. On that day, Verity questions Harper's sadness about Chastin's death while she and Crew are coloring at the kitchen table. Verity takes the children to the lakeside, bringing her manuscript with her. She begins to contemplate a life with only Crew and Jeremy, deciding it's the best option, and hatches a plan to kill Harper. They get into a canoe, and Verity paddles them into deeper water. She overturns the canoe, leaving Harper to drown while she swims to shore with Crew. Crew is hysterical, pleading for Verity to save Harper. Verity instructs Crew to use her phone to call Jeremy and the police. She pretends to make a rescue attempt when they return, and they eventually find Harper's body entangled in a submerged fishing net. Jeremy is devastated, leaving with the ambulance without saying goodbye to Verity, who tries to reassure herself that he’ll forgive her, and that he just needs time to recover from the loss of Harper.
Chapter 20
Lowen is overwhelmed by the disturbing revelations from Verity's autobiography. The contents are so shocking that she vomits. She then contemplates her next steps. She wonders desperately about the best way forward, and whether to go to Jeremy, the police, or both. Amidst this internal pandemonium, Jeremy unexpectedly enters Lowen's room, and the two have intense sex. Their intimacy is a brief, welcome respite from the chaos. Lowen assures him that she is all right, and Jeremy then reveals that he’s chosen to send Verity to a nursing facility on weekdays. The two have sex again, and Jeremy deliberately ejaculates inside her. Lowen resolves that she will make a relationship with Jeremy work, and lies with her hips in the air to try and make pregnancy more likely.
Chapter 21
Lowen, feeling disturbed and overwhelmed, finds herself questioning whether keeping silent about the manuscript is actually in Crew’s best interest. Later, she spends time with Crew in the kitchen. At first their conversation is light and playful, but Lowen quickly begins to subtly probe him about his memories and understanding of the “accident” in the canoe. Lowen is horrified when Crew tells her that his ‘Mommy” said he shouldn’t talk about her. Crew quickly realizes he has said too much, and bites down on the butter knife he was playing with. Jeremy runs in and immediately sees that Crew needs stitches. He tells Lowen that he needs her to stay in the house with Verity while he takes Crew to the ER. To protect herself, she finds the old baby monitor that Verity and Jeremy had used for their children, and sets it up in Verity’s room. She watches Verity on the screen of the monitor, waiting for proof she can move.
So Be It Chapter 15
In the last chapter of So Be It, Verity, reeling from the recent death of her daughter Harper, recounts the scrutiny she faced from the police and her husband, Jeremy. The police interrogate her thoroughly. Verity answers amidst bouts of faux sobs, portraying herself as a grieving mother overwhelmed by the sudden loss. They leave without arresting her.
Jeremy, however, is more persistent and probing in his questions. When Crew falls asleep, Jeremy hammers Verity with queries about the event. She thinks her responses are working, until he asks her why she told Crew to hold his breath. Verity writes that they both realize that their marriage is over immediately. She goes to her office after Jeremy rolls away from her and wonders if she has reached the end of her own story. She doesn’t know if Jeremy will forgive her, or if he will blame her and report her to the police. Verity closes her autobiography by telling her reader that if it’s the second option, she will “just drive her car into a tree.”
Analysis
At this late stage of So Be It, Verity no longer has anything to hide, and flatly chronicles the events of murdering her daughter and attempting to get away with it. Her major concern in this section hasn’t changed—she still wants to be seen as a loving mother and wife—but the stakes are suddenly much higher. Verity decides on what seems like a whim to kill her daughter opportunistically. She has no emotional reaction to having done so beyond concern for her own safety and avoiding punishment. She expertly manipulates the perceptions of those around her, using her reputation and her looks to make herself seem as plausible as possible. She even re-enacts trying to save Harper from the lake when the police, Crew, and Jeremy return.
Although the police seem to believe her, Jeremy has no such intentions. When he asks her the trick question about why she asked Crew to hold his breath, Verity feels their tenuous relationship snap like a twig. Jeremy literally turns away from her, holding Crew to himself and watching him constantly in a pantomime of her own obsessive surveillance. Verity has no idea what to do, and so the autobiography ends on an ambiguous note. Feeling the distance and the coldness from Jeremy, she retreats to her office, the site of her original fictions and the only place she still feels in control.
This section is also preoccupied with people incriminating themselves by saying either too much or not enough. Crew, for example, has had several instances in the novel where he almost tells Lohan Lowen that his mother has directly spoken to him. He manages to avoid confirming this until this very late point in the book, but in the scene in the kitchen when he bites the knife, there's no way for him to take back his admission that his mother speaks to him. It’s an extreme, violent reaction, but seems to fit with the seriousness with which Verity has forced him to keep silent.
Lowen, on the other hand, is consumed by guilt for withholding crucial information from Jeremy. She is placed in an awkward bind, as she feels it's too late to tell Jeremy about the manuscript, but she can't continue her relationship with him with a huge secret hanging over her. Another scene of doubling happens when she and Jeremy have sex and Jeremy wordlessly doesn’t withdraw, ejaculating inside her. They don't speak about it, even afterward, but Lowen lies on her back in order to make sure she holds her semen in for as long as possible. There seems to be an unspoken contract after this liaison that both of them hope that she will get pregnant. Because of this, and because of the revelations in the final chapter of So Be It, to her Lowen feels that she can't in good conscience keep the secret from Jeremy anymore. She doesn't know how she's going to tell him, but that situation resolves itself when Crew has an accident, cutting his mouth with a butter knife and needing to be rushed to the hospital.
It's also clear at this point that Jeremy and Lowen’s relationship has exceeded the realm of the physical and deepened into love. Their bond grows rapidly, with Jeremy admitting his growing feelings for Lowen, even though he acknowledges the complexities of their situation. Lowen, too, is conflicted. She's falling for Jeremy, not just because of their real–life interactions but also due to the insights she's gained about him from Verity's words. She believes he deserves better than what Verity gave him and yearns to be the person who can provide him with genuine love and care. After their spontaneous daytime sex, Jeremy discreetly exits, leaving Lowen to her thoughts. She's torn between her growing affection for Jeremy and the haunting contents of the manuscript. Now that she is so deeply invested in him, she finds it difficult to imagine not telling him about So Be It. However, telling him could also ruin everything they have developed.
