What This Theme Explores
Regret and Unfinished Business probes the gravitational pull of “what if” and the costs of leaving parts of our lives unresolved. The novel asks whether closure is something we earn by returning to the past or something we create by choosing the present with clear eyes. For Dawn Edelstein, regret crystallizes around a forked life: the academic future and love she left with Wyatt Armstrong, and the family she built afterward. The theme tests whether confronting the past cures regret—or simply transforms it.
How It Develops
From the first crisis, the book frames regret as both catalyst and compass. In the Prologue, a plane goes down and Dawn’s life “flashes” not to her husband and daughter, but to Wyatt and the Egyptian desert—an involuntary confession of what remains unfinished. Her choice to fly to Egypt instead of immediately returning to Boston literalizes the pull of the alternate life she once abandoned.
The middle sections braid past and present into two routes—“Land/Egypt” and “Water/Boston”—that push Dawn to test whether closure is a matter of geography or honesty. Returning to the field to work on a newly discovered tomb, she tries to complete the intellectual and romantic project she left undone, while the “Water” chapters sift through the sediment of marriage with Brian Edelstein. The introduction of Winifred 'Win' Morse, a client with her own lost love, mirrors Dawn’s dilemma and sharpens the question: will finishing the past free you, or simply rewrite what you owe the present?
By the end, revelations and reckonings converge. The truth about Meret’s paternity drags private regret into the open, forcing Dawn to weigh two competing futures without the illusions of what might have been. The novel refuses the fantasy that choosing one path erases the other; instead, it argues that only a conscious, accountable decision—accepting the regrets it inevitably creates—can turn unfinished business into a story you can live with.
Key Examples
The story threads large, existential questions through concrete, intimate moments where unfinished business demands attention.
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Dawn’s professional mantra as a death doula turns the theme into a practice. She asks the dying to surface the tasks, confessions, and connections they’ve avoided, modeling an ethics of closure she has not yet applied to herself. Her work becomes a mirror she can’t keep ignoring once her own mortality intrudes.
One of the questions I ask my clients is What’s left unfinished? What is it that you haven’t done yet, that you need to do before you leave this life?
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The plane crash reorders Dawn’s priorities in a single, unsparing image. Seeing Wyatt, not her family, exposes where her heart remains entangled—an emotional archaeology that demands excavation. Her detour to Egypt is less an escape than an attempt to test whether the past can still be changed.
Instead, I see him. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I imagine Wyatt in the middle of the Egyptian desert... A man who hasn’t been part of my life for fifteen years. A place I left behind. A dissertation I never finished.
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Win’s final wish—to contact Thane and acknowledge their history—universalizes the theme beyond Dawn’s circumstances. By asking Dawn to deliver a letter, Win turns regret into an actionable errand, demonstrating that closure often requires courage, specificity, and witness. Her story pressures Dawn to consider what she is asking others to do—speak the unfinished—while avoiding it herself.
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Wyatt’s unplayed voicemail from his late father embodies the peril of deferral. It is a literal message from the past he is too afraid to hear, a small act of avoidance that carries enormous emotional consequence. His reluctance mirrors Dawn’s, showing how unfinished business persists not because it cannot be resolved, but because resolution demands pain.
Character Connections
Across the cast in the Character Overview, unfinished business is less a flaw than a condition of being human—yet each character chooses differently what to do about it. Dawn’s identity fractures along the fault line between caretaker and seeker: the death doula who grants others closure is also the scholar who fled her dissertation and the woman who left a profound love behind. Her journey tests whether “finishing what I started” means returning to Egypt, telling the truth in Boston, or discovering that completion is an internal act rather than an external achievement.
Wyatt personifies the road not taken and also complicates it. He isn’t merely a symbol of Dawn’s past; he carries his own unresolved grief, the unplayed voicemail that reveals how even the most disciplined lives harbor unacknowledged losses. With Brian, regret shifts from the hypothetical to the immediate. His near-infidelity and the fissures in their marriage expose a different kind of unfinished business: the daily work of repair, apology, and recommitment that can’t be solved by romantic nostalgia.
Win serves as Dawn’s ethical counterpoint. Her dying wish—to name the truth, claim her history, and reach for closure even at the eleventh hour—models a bravery Dawn must emulate while she still has time. Finally, Dawn's Mother anchors the theme’s origin story: her regret that her husband died alone propels Dawn into end-of-life care, turning personal sorrow into a vocation aimed at preventing that same unfinished farewell for others.
Symbolic Elements
The Book of Two Ways, the ancient Egyptian map of the afterlife, visualizes the novel’s central claim: different routes can lead to the same destination, but the traveler must choose. By splitting the narrative into “Water/Boston” and “Land/Egypt,” the story transforms an archaeological diagram into a moral and emotional cartography.
Dawn’s unfinished dissertation functions as a material relic of the self she set aside. Every impulse to complete it is less about career and more about reclaiming an identity—proof that some unfinished business is about who you get to be, not what you get to do.
The unexcavated tomb externalizes the work of digging into the past. For Wyatt, its discovery redeems years of deferred effort; for Dawn, each brushed-away layer is an invitation to confront what she buried in herself.
Win’s letter distills closure into an object: a sealed container of truth and apology that must be delivered to fulfill its purpose. It suggests that closure often has to be spoken, shared, and received—unfinished business rarely ends in solitude.
Contemporary Relevance
In a world of rekindled threads and searchable pasts, the pull of “the one that got away” is only a click away, amplifying the ache of alternate lives. The novel speaks to the modern churn of FOMO and choice overload: career pivots, caregiving obligations, and the competing promises of passion and stability. It proposes a countercultural resolution—peace comes not from optimizing for the perfect path, but from taking responsibility for the path you choose and telling the truth about the ones you didn’t. In doing so, it reframes closure as an act of agency rather than a stroke of fate.
Essential Quote
One of the questions I ask my clients is What’s left unfinished? What is it that you haven’t done yet, that you need to do before you leave this life?
This line distills the theme into a practice: naming, not numbing. It exposes the gap between Dawn’s professional clarity and her personal avoidance, turning the question outward and inward at once. The novel’s answer isn’t to complete everything, but to decide—openly, bravely—which unfinished business must be faced so the rest of life can proceed.