The Saturday skating class is meant for beginners, and one of the beginners is a small boy who cannot stay upright. Lily LaBlanc, who agreed to help with the lessons without asking who her partner would be, holds his hand for the whole hour. Her partner turns out to be Toren Kane, the boy she grew up with and has not spoken to in almost four years, and he is far better with the children than with her. He calls her by her surname, like a slap. Then, while her father talks a few seats away, he quietly asks whether she is all right. Undone by Peyton Corinne, out now (20 October 2026), is made of moments like that one: cruelty on the surface, care underneath, and a father watching from behind the glass.
The Reunion Undone Asks Peyton Corinne’s Readers to Believe
The premise is pure romantic melodrama. Toren and Lily met as children in North Carolina, he a foster kid with a black eye, she the motherless daughter of the big house on the hill, and they were inseparable until one night at eighteen ended everything. Now Toren is a senior defenseman on the Waterfell hockey team, chasing a last chance at the professional league, and Lily’s father, the man who coached Toren as a boy, has just been hired as his assistant coach. Lily has come too, enrolled at the same university, engaged to a man her father chose, with a ring she keeps hidden in a drawer.
What makes it more than melodrama is that the novel takes the long view of damage. Both leads believe something different about why they were separated, and Undone by Peyton Corinne lets that gap do a great deal of work. Readers who have followed the series will recognise Toren as the player everyone at Waterfell loves to hate, the one whose hit on the captain hangs over Unsteady and its sequels. This last book is the case for the defence, and it is a persuasive one.
In Undone, Peyton Corinne’s Best Creation Is Lily
Toren is a familiar figure in the genre, the scarred enforcer whose rage is a coat of armour. Lily is something rarer. She is literal-minded, sensitive to texture and noise, half deaf, fixated on one dead painter and prone to stretches of grey exhaustion that swallow whole days. Corinne writes those stretches from inside, and they are the bravest pages in the book. Lily does not feel sad so much as heavy; she sleeps through afternoons, forgets to eat, and then tells herself she was simply being lazy, because that is what her father has always told her. The novel names this as depression through the mouth of the one person who refuses to call her selfish, and the moment lands harder than any of the love scenes.
Her hearing loss is written with the same attention. Lily is ashamed of the aid and leaves it out whenever she can, so conversations slide past her and she guesses at what she missed rather than ask. The men who are meant to protect her use that against her: her father sighs at her volume, and her fiance mutters remarks behind his hand that she cannot catch. It is a small, sharp way of showing how control works in a family that looks perfect from the road.
Her small victories matter just as much. A roommate who does not run, an evening of nail polish and an old romantic comedy on a laptop, hair braided while it is still wet: these scenes are tiny, and Undone by Peyton Corinne treats them as events. So it should. For a young woman who has never been allowed a friend of her own, they are.
Where Undone Loses Its Footing
The trouble is the machinery that keeps the couple apart. Christopher LaBlanc is less a character than a weather system, controlling his daughter, punishing Toren with extra drills and needling him with old headlines, and he rarely gets a scene that complicates him. Because the father is so plainly the obstacle, the long refusal of the two leads to sit down and compare stories begins to feel like a requirement of the plot rather than of the people. Their friends, sensibly, start asking the questions the lovers will not. Undone by Peyton Corinne is at its weakest whenever it needs a third conversation to be interrupted.
Toren’s voice has its own limits. His chapters are profane, possessive and full of self-loathing, which suits a young man raised on threats, but the possessiveness is presented as devotion without much scrutiny. When he admits his feelings for Lily feel dark, the book nods and moves on.
The prose has its own repetitions. Grape lollipops, pinkie promises, golden eyes and a whispered vow of forever return so often that by the second half they stop feeling like keepsakes and start feeling like punctuation. The book is long, too, and it front-loads its tension and back-loads its revelations, so the final stretch piles one crisis on another with little room to breathe. And the heat, explicit and frequently rough, is a large share of the page count; readers who come for the angst may find themselves skimming.
On the page, the content runs to suicide in the family past, depression, parental and coaching abuse, neglect, violence and grief, and none of it is gratuitous, but all of it is there.
The Family Undone Builds Instead
Against all that, the book has a second love story, and it may be the better one. Toren lives in the basement of his head coach, Nate Harris, and Harris’s wife Sahara treats him as a son long before he can tolerate it. She bakes for him and brings him a pastry from a Boston shop they once visited together, which sends him straight out of the house. Her husband’s rules are small and patient: eat at the table, and if you want to leave, ask. Watching Toren learn those rules, and slowly stop flinching, is the most moving thread in Undone by Peyton Corinne. A teammate who keeps turning up whether or not he is wanted completes the picture.
The earlier couples are present too, gathered around the edges in a way that rewards anyone who has read Unbound, though a newcomer will not be lost. This is the fourth and final Waterfell book, and it knows it.
The Writer Saying Goodbye
Corinne has spent three years on Waterfell University, and the end matter of this book reads as a farewell. She dedicates the novel partly to her younger self, the girl who wrote her way toward this career through years of depression, and closes her acknowledgments by saying goodbye to the fictional campus that sustained her. That context explains a great deal about Lily’s chapters and the care taken with them, and about why Undone by Peyton Corinne reads, at its best, like a letter to readers who have been where she has been.
She is also a writer who thinks in music. The book opens with a playlist of nearly sixty songs, heavy on Ethel Cain, Jeff Buckley and emo staples, and records spin throughout the story as a second language between the leads. For readers who want something in the same register, Elle Kennedy’s The Dixon Rule offers college hockey with a similar coach’s-family complication and far less darkness, while Hannah Grace’s Wildfire carries the same new adult mix of banter and old wounds.
What It Leaves Behind
Undone by Peyton Corinne is not a tidy novel. It is too long, its villain twirls an invisible moustache, and its central couple spend much of the book refusing to say the one thing that would save them months of pain. But it is honest about depression in a way few hockey romances attempt, and it believes, sincerely, that the cure for being unwanted is being looked after. Readers who finish the series here will remember less the games than the kitchen table where a hostile young man was finally asked to stay for dessert.