45 pages • 1 hour read
Mikki Daughtry, Rachael LippincottAll This Time
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A 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 24-35Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 24 Summary
Marley and Kyle take Georgia on a walk. Kyle spots a silver Toyota driving through the rain, the same kind of car he drove on the night of the accident, which also happened in the rain. Kyle realizes that it’s June 7—a full year since Kimberly’s death. Marley and Kyle rush home: “All these months later and I still don’t like storms” (197). Marley admits that she isn’t sure she deserves to feel happy. Kyle comforts her with words of love, and they fall asleep. Kyle is woken by a roll of thunder. He notices that Marley isn’t in his basement room with him. Georgia paws at the sliding doors, and Kyle goes out into the storm in search of Marley.
Kyle heads back to the house when he sees all the lights go on. He sees a dark silhouette in the doorframe and passes out from pain.
Chapter 25 Summary
Chapter 26 Summary
Chapter 27 Summary
Kyle wakes up in the hospital and sees his mother. He asks about Marley and his mom doesn’t know who he’s talking about. She asks him if he knows what happened to him, and he tells her about chasing after Marley in the storm. Shocked and confused, his mother tells him he’s been in a car accident with Kimberly. Kimberly survived but Kyle has been in a coma for eight weeks.
Kyle sneaks out of his hospital bed at night to look for Marley, but passes out in the elevator. Dr. Benefield explains: “‘Things you heard or saw could have found their way into your subconscious. It’s not uncommon in comas’” (212). Kyle’s year of Marley and writing for the Times and mourning Kimberly has been a coma-induced dream. He opened his eyes during his coma, taking in external stimuli and recreating it in his dreams.
Chapter 28 Summary
Chapter 29 Summary
Kimberly tries to apologize for breaking up with Kyle before the accident. He tells her to stop and that she was right. He asks her to leave because he’s now mourning Marley and seeing Kim alive is too confusing. Kyle falls asleep and dreams of Marley. When he wakes up, he searches for her online, confident that she exists.
Chapter 30 Summary
Kyle and Kimberly are awkward together. He points out that they tried breaking up with one another eight times. He asks her why she’s now pretending that she didn’t break up with him in the car, and she storms out.
Kyle endures physical therapy, feeling defeated that he has to recover all over again. Kyle meets with Dr. Ronson, a psychiatrist. Dr. Ronson wants to debunk the external input that informed Kyle’s coma dream. Kyle tells him that Marley smelled like orange blossoms or jasmine. Dr. Ronson opens the window, revealing a courtyard of honeysuckle.
Chapter 31 Summary
Kyle searches his memories of Marley for details about her last name or the school she attended. He realizes that he knows very little about her, which “just means I wasn’t paying attention to anyone but myself” (235). Kimberly visits Kyle, and they talk about their relationship, how they love one another as friends but have been settling for one another for years. Kyle encourages Kim to live a happy life discovering herself without him and to think about Sam.
Chapter 32 Summary
Chapter 33 Summary
Kyle remembers what Marley said about Laura. He searches online for “Marley” and “Laura” and “accident.” He finds an article about Laura, who died when she was hit by a car, and her sister Marley Ellis. They live seven miles away. Kyle tries to convince Sam into breaking him out of the hospital and driving to the Ellis house, but Sam refuses. He says that he’s only ever tried to be a good friend to Kyle, especially after the football injury. But he can’t let Sam pursue a girl he never actually met.
Chapter 34 Summary
Kyle sneaks out of the hospital and calls an Uber to go to the Ellis’. Outside the house, he sees a duck statue and is confident that he’s making the right decision. A man opens the door. Kyle asks for Marley. Marley comes to the door, but she’s a little girl. Kyle realizes that he read the article wrong. The article was about Lara, not Laura, and it made no mention of a twin named Marley. Kyle rushes away but collapses on the street. He calls Sam and Kim for help, and they pick him up. Kyle finally acknowledges that Marley isn’t real.
Chapter 35 Summary
Back in the hospital, Kyle refuses pain medication because it puts him in such a deep sleep that he dreams of Marley. Kyle wants to live in reality.
The courtyard sprinklers spray against Kyle’s hospital room window. He sees a girl in the courtyard plucking snails from the ground. He recognizes her: It’s Marley saving the snails. He realizes that the nurse who helps him to physical therapy looks like this girl, Marley, only older.
Chapters 24-35 Analysis
These chapters provide a shocking plot twist. It turns out that Marley was right to say that their life together was too good to be true. That the narrative of the last few chapters has been a coma-induced dream makes sense: Kyle’s life was nearly perfect. He had quickly recovered from the physical trauma of the accident, had a girlfriend he loved, a dream internship, a new school, a fresh start, and neat resolution with Sam. This tidy life months after such a traumatic accident was too idyllic to be real.
The unreality of his year with Marley also explains the fairy tale quality of their relationship. In hindsight, it lacked authenticity. The flowers and the kite were more allegorical than realistic. That Kyle had fallen in love with Marley so quickly also seems surreal. Daughtry and Lippincott suggest that life isn’t about perfection. Instead, it is full of obstacles that require self-reflection, grit, perseverance, and Acclimating to Change.
The plot twist jumpstarts more character development for Kyle. He suffers yet another loss. He had finally come to terms with Kim’s death and now has to grapple with the loss of Marley, how she was a dream and doesn’t exist. Kyle’s resilience is tested. His experience is unique, isolating him from his friends and family who can’t understand what he’s going through. The fictional Marley helped Kyle endure the supposed death of Kim; now Kyle must find his own way to cope with the loss of a life he thought he had. Kyle experienced his coma-induced dreams as reality. His journey to accepting the real world seems like it will be a steeply uphill battle.
The authors explore the connection between mental and physical health. Kyle’s accident, heightened by his dreamy experience with Marley and its dissolution, requires both psychological and physical healing. Kyle struggles through physical therapy and mental upheaval. Both are arduous and rely on Kyle’s resilience. Prolonged hospitalization has taken a toll on Kyle’s ability to walk without support, paralleling his mental state. Kyle literally can’t step forward, just as he is emotionally unprepared to let go of the past.
Kyle has an issue with control. Working on healing physically is more within his power than healing mentally. Kyle strengthens his body while he tries to strengthen his mind. Daughtry and Lippincott emphasize how mental healing is a particularly difficult process, as it is internal and based on often inexpressible feelings. Physical health, on the other, hand is tactile. Kyle is alone in his emotional health: Only he knows what his vivid fantasy of Marley felt like, and what it feels like to lose it.
Doctors help Kyle break down the symbolism that informed his dreams. Everything Kyle had been experiencing in his subconscious was informed by external influences. His nightmares of Kimberly being alive were induced by the actual Kim who visited him regularly. His memories of Marley’s scent were actually the aroma of the honeysuckle outside his hospital window. This demonstrates the power of the human brain to make associations and turn pieces of reality into fictions.
In his coma, Kyle also realized things about his loved ones. Subconsciously, he saw the truth about Sam’s feelings for Kimberly. Kyle’s coma was an opportunity to take stock of things in his life he had repressed. Before the accident, Kim was an outlet for his anxieties, someone whom he could rely on for a path forward. After Kim’s imagined death, Kyle finds a new path in Marley. This highlights how Kyle struggles to be independent. In replacing Kim with Marley, Kyle demonstrates that he fixates his happiness on girls who he can dote on, and who pay him close attention in return. Kyle now understands Kim’s point about finding herself outside of their relationship. However, he hasn’t applied this understanding to himself.
Chapter 35 brings another plot twist: the revelation that Marley does in fact exist. Daughtry and Lippincott foreshadowed Marley’s actual existence in earlier chapters. When Kyle first meets Marley in his dreams, he notes that she looks familiar. This is because his brain has been scanning her as she tells him stories in the hospital. The real Marley is skittishly shy, just as she was in Kyle’s fantasy. Her telling stories to Kyle is remarkable because of her general refusal to speak. The real Marley is a sadder version of the Marley in Kyle’s mind.
Kyle realizes that he had never asked Marley real questions during their fantasy relationship. He knows very little about her, which proves that he still needs to work on his self-absorption. In his coma, Kyle unwittingly used Marley for his own healing, and their relationship was imbalanced. Now that Kyle knows there is a real Marley, he has an opportunity to be more selfless and to act as a support system for someone else.
