While Canon deals with the grief of losing his mother, Neevah’s storyline illustrates the impact that past hurts can have on the present moment and the importance of finding forgiveness for wounds of the past. Along with the passion of falling in love with Canon and the excitement, and challenge, of working on his movie, Neevah’s character arc demands that she confront the bitterness she still feels over the affair that Terry and Brandon carried on behind her back. For her own health, mental as well as physical, Neevah looks for a way to repair this relationship so that she can feel like she has her family back. As Neevah draws closer to her family again, the novel explores the benefits of healing and reconciliation.

Neevah begins the reconciliation when she is visiting North Carolina over Christmas, on break from filming the movie. While her confrontation with Terry at that time is mutually hostile, things move to a new level of understanding when Neevah inadvertently lets Quianna, her niece, know the truth about how her parents got together. This compels Terry to re-examine her own circumstances and her judgments about Neevah. To Neevah’s surprise, what looks like resentment on Terry’s part that Neevah left home, moved to New York City, and established a career turns out to be Terry’s expression of loss at the relationship with her sister.

Ultimately, in their conversations on the topic, Terry admits that as a young adult, she was insecure about her own worth and jealous that Brandon was interested in Neevah and not her. This idea of jealousy and the wounds it deals is later echoed in the animosity that Camille expresses toward Neevah after Camille learns that Canon is pursuing a relationship with Neevah. Neevah feels her own experiences of jealousy when she sees Evan’s sister Arietta with Canon and again when she views the shampoo commercial with Camille showing off shiny, healthy hair while Neevah is in the midst of a lupus flare-up. Neevah’s jealousy helps her understand the pain that Terry once felt, leading her to forgive Terry for pursuing a sexual relationship with Brandon while he was dating Neevah.

As part of the optimistic conclusion of the novel, Terry and Neevah’s relationship is restored by Terry’s apology, Neevah’s forgiveness, and the exchange of a kidney. Another exchange in the novel that underlines the need to confront and examine wounds of the past takes place between Neevah and her mother. During her visit home for Christmas, Neevah, after more than a decade away, finally finds the courage to tell her mother how she feels about their separation. Her mother’s apology goes a long way toward restoring Neevah’s trust in her as a source of emotional support, which is confirmed when her mother faces her fear of flying to come to Neevah’s bedside when she is ill.

The reknitting of relationships between mothers and daughters is subtly echoed by Dessi’s wish to return to Alabama to care for her mother, even though Dessi realizes that she is returning her family to a world that permits the expression of racism. In these various ways, the characters of Reel find that coming to peace with the wounds of the past adds to the strength and health of their current relationships.