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This essay is the sixth in my new Inside the Story series, where I share the creative decisions, real-life influences, and writing philosophy behind my novels.
The Ending We Want for Characters We Love
Many readers seek comfort in the fiction they read. After following a character through tragedy and darkness, we want the ending to make it up to them. In the case of Beth Clark, the protagonist of What Remains After, we want every wrong righted and every wound healed. Relationships need to be restored, questions answered, and offenders held accountable for their actions. We want every fear silenced by a clear promise that nothing painful will happen again.
A happily-ever-after ending.
After everything Beth has endured, wouldn’t she deserve that? Of course she would. But deserving an uncomplicated future and actually receiving one are not the same thing.
Pain doesn’t follow a system of fairness. Surviving something unthinkable doesn’t guarantee that healing will arrive quickly or cleanly. I could have tied Beth’s life into a pretty little bow, but bows belong on gifts, not wounds.
An Easy Ending Would Have Been a False Promise
Beth’s traumatic experiences have real consequences. That’s the way it is in our fallen world. She may have difficulty trusting others again, fearing further pain from vulnerability. She may experience grief and anger or struggle with complicated relationships. Memories of her trauma may not conveniently disappear.
A final chapter cannot erase years of harm.
This is not about making the novel darker for its own sake. Artificially tidying up Beth’s ending would contradict everything the novel has already said about consequences. After all, if consequences matter more than plot twists, they must still matter when the story reaches its ending, as I explored in an earlier Inside the Story essay.
Beth does not need to be untouched by her past to move forward. She needs her past to stop dictating every choice she makes.
Healing Is Not a Straight Road
We often imagine healing as a neat sequence of events, like a straight path through a field of poppies: we experience pain, gain insight, learn to forgive, find closure, and peace follows.
But real healing can be more like a winding, rocky path through a dense forest. It’s much less orderly.
A person can make progress and still have difficult days mixed in with good ones. A setback isn’t necessarily a return to the beginning, like landing on the wrong square in a game of Chutes and Ladders.
Some of the survival responses that once helped someone endure can also make healing harder later. Distrust, emotional distance, hypervigilance, or refusing to depend on others may once have offered protection. But they can also keep love and joy at a distance.
Think of it as a wall we build to survive danger. It doesn’t disappear just because the danger has passed. Sometimes we must dismantle that wall brick by brick, even while part of us still believes it is necessary.
In Beth’s case, her road to healing is real, even if it is not complete.
Hope Must Make Room for Grief
Some things that are lost cannot be restored: a safe childhood, years spent in fear, people who are gone, relationships damaged beyond repair, opportunities lost because of fear.
In What Remains After, Beth’s future can’t depend on pretending those losses were insignificant. She is free to grieve and still build a life.
Her faith in God doesn’t require her to pretend those losses don’t matter. Scripture makes room for lament as well as praise, for grief as well as hope. Don’t believe me? Just read the Psalms.
Honest faith can acknowledge what was lost while still believing that loss isn’t the whole story.
As my writing philosophy, Redemptive Realism, recognizes, pain doesn’t cancel hope, and hope doesn’t invalidate pain.
Hope Can Be Frightening
We often describe hope as comforting, gentle, and uplifting. But for someone who has been repeatedly hurt, hope can require enormous courage.
Think about it.
To hope is to trust someone who could disappoint you or to love someone you could lose. Hope may mean admitting you want something or letting go of familiar survival patterns to pursue it. It means imagining a different future and stepping forward in faith without guarantees of safety or success.
Despair can sometimes feel safer because it asks nothing. Hope requires vulnerability.
Hope is not always the absence of fear. Sometimes hope asks us to walk directly through it.
Faith can work much the same way. It doesn’t always mean knowing how things will turn out. Isn’t that frustrating? Sometimes faith means taking the next step with only the assurance that God will walk the road with us.
Love and Faith Are Not Shortcuts
Love can help. So can community, counseling, and faith. But none of these is a magic eraser that wipes away pain and suffering.
For Beth, faith in Christ is where the promise of healing begins.
She does not simply need the right relationship, a single apology, stronger faith, one act of forgiveness, or a dramatic moment of closure to heal. She has tried or experienced many of those things. Her road toward healing begins as she places her faith in God and learns to forgive.
But faith is not evidence that the struggle should end. We live in a fallen world where trauma has consequences, yet faith can sustain us as the struggle continues.
A person can trust God and still grieve. Jesus grieved. She can pray and still need counseling. She can forgive and still set boundaries. She can believe in Christ’s redemption while acknowledging that what happened to her was wrong and left scars.
This is the journey Beth Clark walks in my novel.
Redemption doesn’t always mean returning to who we were before suffering. Sometimes it means slowly becoming a new creation without denying what happened.
What I Wanted for Beth
The ending of What Remains After didn’t need to give Beth a perfect resolution or erase her pain and suffering. It didn’t have to shield her from future pain or answer all her questions.
What I wanted for her was agency and dignity. I wanted the truth to be known. I wanted her to have meaningful relationships with worthy people and room to grieve the past without allowing it to continue dictating her future.
Closure says the story is finished. Hope says the story can continue.
Think about that.
A conventional happy ending says everything is all right now.
A hopeful ending says not everything is all right, but something good in the future is still possible.
Beth didn’t need to be completely healed by the final page. I needed her to believe healing was possible.
The Kind of Hope I Believe In
I didn’t give Beth an easy ending because I wanted to give her an honest one.
What happened to her could not be erased by philosophy, psychology, or a final conversation. Healing required faith in God and the courage to allow Him to lead her over time, to face her grief, and to accept support. Most importantly, it required her to be willing to risk hope again.
That hope might unfold unevenly throughout her life, according to God’s plan. But difficult hope is still hope.
Grace can meet us in broken places without pretending they were never broken.
My stories face the dark, but they end in light. Not the blinding light of easy answers, but the steady light of God’s love, the light that helps someone see the next step.
Sometimes the most truthful happy ending is simply the courage to believe in a tomorrow and an eternity.
About What Remains After
When I wrote What Remains After, I knew Beth Clark's journey couldn't be tied up with a neat bow. Some wounds leave lasting consequences, and redemption doesn't always mean that everything broken can be restored. But I also believe hope can survive even when life doesn't unfold as we wish. If you'd like to discover the story behind these reflections, I invite you to explore What Remains After.
Note: What Remains After is a literary psychological suspense novel set in rural Alberta, exploring childhood trauma, faith, survival, truth-telling, and healing across two timelines. The novel is available now on Amazon in Canada and the United States. It’s also available online at Indigo and Barnes & Noble.
Blessings,
Pauline J. Grabia
Stories of Consequence
Fiction that faces the dark, but ends in light.
FAQs:
Why didn't Beth get an easy ending in What Remains After?
Beth's traumatic experiences have real and lasting consequences. Giving her a perfectly tidy ending would have contradicted what the novel says about trauma, choices, and consequences. I didn't need Beth to be completely healed by the final page. I needed her to believe that healing was possible.
What is the difference between a happy ending and a hopeful ending?
A conventional happy ending suggests that everything is all right now. A hopeful ending acknowledges that not everything is resolved, but that something good is still possible. As I write in the essay, “Closure says the story is finished. Hope says the story can continue.”
Why isn't healing always a straight path?
Healing can include good days and difficult ones, progress and setbacks. Some of the responses that once helped a person survive, such as distrust, emotional distance, or refusing to depend on others, can also make healing more difficult later. A setback does not necessarily mean someone has returned to the beginning.
How does faith shape Beth's healing in What Remains After?
For Beth, faith in God becomes central to her journey toward healing, but faith does not magically erase her grief or the consequences of what happened to her. She can trust God and still grieve, pray and still need counseling, forgive and still set boundaries. Faith sustains her as healing continues rather than providing an instant solution to her pain.
How does Redemptive Realism influence the ending of What Remains After?
Redemptive Realism allows pain and hope to exist together. It doesn't require darkness to disappear before light can enter the story. Beth's ending acknowledges what she has lost and the scars she still carries while leaving room for faith, healing, meaningful relationships, and a future. Pain doesn't cancel hope, and hope doesn't invalidate pain.
Related Posts:
A scene may be straightforward on the page yet still leave the writer staring at the cursor, reluctant or even unable to write. Some chapters are difficult because the writer doesn't know what should happen next. Others are difficult because the writer knows exactly what must happen but doesn't want to go there.