The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides. Summary, Psychological Thriller Part 2.

 

In case you haven't read part 1.
Part 1 link: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides summary, Psychological Thriller Part 1.

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    " Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in more uglier ways."

    Alicia Berenson agrees to see Theo when Yuri, a nurse at The Grove, informed her. Yuri was a kind man with a generous smile. Alicia was on good terms with Yuri unlike with others at The Grove, which made it easier for Theo to meet Alicia. Theo waited for Alicia in a therapy room. When Yuri accompanied Alicia to the therapy room, Theo asked Yuri to leave the room and wait outside. Initially Yuri refused to leave considering Theo's safety, but soon he left the room upon Theo's insistence that he had the personal attack alarm with him. It was tool given to every faculty member at The Grove to ensure their safety. 

    "I'll be on the other side of the room. Just in case you need," said Yuri.

    "That's not necessary. But thanks," said Theo.

    Now it's just Alicia and Theo in the room. There was only a deep silence from her side. She was too much drugged to feel anything. Christian, a former employee at Broadmoor, was the in charge of Alicia's medication. Theo and Christian had known each other at Broadmoor but never spoke. 

    "I'm glad you agreed to see me," said Theo to Alicia.

    No reaction. Her expressions were blank. He went on talking to her, but there were no reactions from her. She remained silent as always. The session ended like that — one sided conservation. Theo had no clue how to tackle her silence. As the first step, he talked to Professor Diomedes about lowering her drug level so that she can feel her surroundings. Professor Diomedes suggested that it would be a dangerous idea to allow her to feel anything. 

    "Don't forget that she was highly suicidal when we brought her to The Grove. And the medication keeps her stable. It keeps her alive. There are high chances that she will be overwhelmed by her feelings unable to cope," said Professor Diomedes.

    Professor Diomedes requested Christian to lower Alicia's medication. Meanwhile, Theo started digging into Alicia's past. He tried contacting her guardian, Max Berenson. Max was Gabriel's brother. Max and Gabriel were not biologically related. Gabriel's parents adopted Max before he was born. Max Berenson inherited Gabriel's wealth after his death. Now, he is the guardian for his wife, Alicia. 

    Theo couldn't reach Max that day. Kathy was not there when Theo went home. She hadn't been home early since several days. She made excuses to be late. She made home when Theo fell asleep. He couldn't take these anymore. He felt overwhelmed by her actions and betrayal. So he went all the way to Ruth's home, unintentionally. Ruth was surprised to see him again. She offered him some wine, and they began to speak.

(This therapy session between them is one of the most painful parts, which many of us here can relate to it, too. So I would like to go in detail with this section of the story. You may skip this part if you don't enjoy. I'm highlighting it in red for you all to identify the specific part.)

    Theo shared everything that happened between him and Kathy. He shared about getting stoned again, about smoking in secret, about how he found Kathy cheating him, about the emails he read. Ruth listened to Theo without any interruption. She looked at him with concern. 

    "I'm sorry this happened, Theo. I know how much Kathy means to you. How much you love her," said Ruth.

    He told everything so as to justify Kathy's actions — that it was not her fault, but Ruth disagreed to it. Therapy worked that way. The aim of the therapist is to make the patient admit the truth, which he's not ready to accept. Theo was not ready to accept Kathy's betrayal. He wasn't ready to hate her. He wasn't ready to fight with her. He wasn't ready to LEAVE her. Ruth tried to make him realize that Kathy wasn't worth of his love, kind, and most importantly his trust. He was simply not ready to accept it. Ruth reminded him that he was here before with the same issue — trying to please someone unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, trying to make them love you. The situation he had with his father. Theo tried to defend Kathy again. He hated the fact that she compared Kathy with his father.

"You know, Theo, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren't loved when we needed the most. It's a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved," said Ruth. She tried hard to make him realize the emotional abuse he'd been going through since his childhood. He knew everything Ruth told was correct, yet he was not ready to accept it or to leave her.

    Theo started following Kathy to find the stranger she had an affair with. He was a married man. Theo felt sad for the innocent wife the stranger was cheating on. He felt the urge to help the innocent wife find out about her cheating husband. He decided to tell her. 

    Few days later Theo received a call from Max Berenson. Theo suggested that he needed to meet him in person to talk about Alicia. He contacted all the people who related to Alicia and met them in person—Max Berenson, Gabril's brother; Jean Felix, Alicia's friend; Paul, Alicia's cousin. Although he didn't find anything informative about Alicia's case, he came to know something about her—something apart from all those media's rumors. In the process of his therapy session, he also got the approval from The Grove and Alicia's art therapist to allow Alicia paint in solitude. She even painted but ever spoke until now. This permission for her to pain alone led to something shocking—she attacked Elif, one of the other patients at The Grove. This event attracted many shocking events. The information was passed to the trust, the one which sponsors The Grove. And most surprisingly Alicia spoke for the first time since the murder. Alicia spoke to Theo. She handed him her diary, which revealed most of the information about her past, about her childhood traumatic events, about the love she had for husband, and more. 

    She wrote about how her mother tried to kill herself in a car where she had also been inside the car. How her father's death made her feel suicidal and paranoid. How Gabriel loved her despite all these flaws. How she loved him sincerely. The fact that she hated Gabriel had a gun in their house. About being followed by the strange stalker, which no one ever believed that he existed—including Gabriel. 

    Theo visited Paul for the second time in Cambridge, where he found the real childhood trauma that Alicia experienced. It was her father. The words he said to Alicia at the time of her mother's car wreck. " I wish you were the one who died in the car," her father said, which killed Alicia. Theo doubted this traumatic past had some connection to Gabriel's murder. 

    Now that Alicia started to speak, the therapy session is no more a one-sided conversation. It's going to be an actual therapy session where both the therapist and the patient speak. At last, Theo's dream — to solve the mystery behind her silence was to become true. 

    She started talking about the night the murder happened. The part she hasn't wrote in her diary. She mentioned that someone broke into the house that night. It stopped there. She hasn't continued further. What really happened during that night?? The answer he all continued the story for. The answer Theo waited for is about to be revealed by Alicia. 

"The man, who had been stalking, tied me to a chair. He had Gabriel's gun in his hand. When Gabriel arrived home, he attacked him with the gun and tied him to another chair and shot him six times. He released me from the chair and left without saying anything," said Alicia.

    Theo knew she was lying. But he didn't say anything to her. Instead, he asked about her silence after the murder. Why didn't she speak after that. Alicia said that she tried to speak but no sound came from her mouth. And when she gained her strength back to speak, it was too late to speak anything.

    Theo waited to ask her the truth about the murder. He didn't ask her right away because he thought that it would overwhelm her. The next day when he came to The Grove, he found Alicia in a coma. "She took an overdose," Yuri said. 

    But Theo found that someone had injected her with the overdose. The police arrested Christian suspecting that he would have done it. There were two reasons for their suspicion—he was the in charge for Alicia's medication, and he was the one who treated Alicia in private during her suicide attempt after her father's death.

    Was it really Christian? Now that Alicia is in coma, what about the truth that happened that night? We reached the end of the story. The real twist.

    The cops found the answer for all the questions in Alicia's diary. Alicia wrote the truth before she went into a coma. She confessed murdering her husband, Gabriel. If she really killed her husband, what about that stalker? Did he exist? If yes, who was that? Yes, the man did exist. It was THEO FABER. The man who stalked her was THEO FABER. The fact she said about him breaking into the house and tied them to a chair was all real, but he didn't kill Gabriel. He just let Alicia knew about her husband, Gabriel, was cheating on her with his wife, Kathy. He just played a little game, which triggered Alicia to kill Gabriel. Theo asked Gabriel at the gun point whether he would die for his wife, Alicia. And he chose to say no.

    "No, I want to live," said Gabriel, which killed Alicia for the second time — first time being killed by her father. Gabriel killed Alicia for the second time, same as Admetus let his wife, Alcestis, die instead of him. She shot her husband five times as soon as Theo left the house. THEO was the one who injected her with the overdose since she lied about the murder.

    Had he known about her past, he wouldn't have done any of that to her. At the end, Theo was happy that she finally opened up herself. He succeeded as her therapist.

Should you have any doubts about the story feel free to comment.