Every year I get older, and somehow love still feels like this impossible, humiliating puzzle no one actually solves. It broke me once, and no matter how hard I try, walls stay high, and cautiousness lives inside my brain. So instead, I read about love – the beauty, the heartbreak, and everything that comes with it.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to stories like Every Year After. Not because I believe in love, necessarily. More because I’m fascinated by what happens after it. What happens when a relationship ends but continues shaping your life anyway?
We meet Percy Fraser giving a speech at her friend’s engagement party. Public speaking is her personal nightmare. She overthinks every word, every pause, every expression on someone’s face. She’s anxious, tightly wound, and immediately recognizable to anyone whose brain has ever fixated on the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment.
Case in point: a door that won’t close properly.
It’s such a small detail, but it tells you everything about Percy. When your life feels emotionally unfixable, your brain latches onto problems that at least pretend to have solutions. A crooked picture frame. A broken latch. A door you can force shut if you just try hard enough.
Regret doesn’t work like that
Percy is giving a speech at her best friend Chantal and her fiancé Drew’s engagement party, and within minutes, she’s talking about how difficult love is to find.
Which tells you everything you need to know about Percy.
This isn’t a woman who believes in happily-ever-after anymore. Whatever happened in Barry’s Bay didn’t just break her heart. It changed the way she understands love itself.
And then we see the boy that broke her heart or whose heart she broke — Sam.
Immediately, you realize the speech was never really about the engagement at all.
The flashbacks hurt because they’re so ordinary.
No grand gestures. No sweeping declarations. Just two young people standing by a lake looking at each other like the future is something they get to share.
The chemistry between them feels effortless, which somehow makes it worse. The relationships that stay with us aren’t always the dramatic ones. Sometimes they’re the ones who felt safe. The ones you quietly built your future around before you realized futures can disappear.
Years later, Percy is still trying to figure out where she went wrong. Not because she misses the relationship, but because she never stopped carrying responsibility for its ending.
There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from believing you participated in your own heartbreak.
Percy lives somewhere inside that space now, caught between mourning what happened and defining herself by it.
PERCY NOW
She works as an obituary writer, which is almost too obvious as symbolism. Then again, people who spend years carrying unresolved grief tend to become experts at recognizing it in other people.
She writes about endings for a living because she never figured out how to make peace with her own.
Then comes the phone call.
Ten years after leaving Barry’s Bay, her phone lights up with a familiar number. For a brief moment, she thinks it might be Sam.
That moment says more than any flashback could.
For all the years that have passed, some part of Percy still expects him to return.
The caller is Charlie, Sam’s older brother. He’s calling to tell her that Sue has died.
Percy immediately feels the guilt.
She immediately apologizes for losing touch.
And I think that’s because losing people you love creates a very specific fear: that enough time will pass, enough distance will grow between you, and eventually you’ll lose the right to grieve them.
Percy has spent ten years carrying the consequences of leaving. Sue’s death forces her to confront those feelings and those fears.
Charlie responds with one of the episode’s strongest lines: there are a lot of things both of them could have done differently. It’s such an adult response that it almost hurts.
It does hurt.
No anger. No blame. Just two people acknowledging that regret doesn’t disappear with time.
There are no villains. No betrayals. Just people making imperfect choices and living with them longer than they expected.
After the call, Percy spirals over the broken door, slamming it shut over and over again.
And honestly, it’s one of the most accurate depictions of anxiety I’ve seen in a long time.
The door isn’t the problem.
Sam isn’t even the problem.
The problem is that ten years have passed and nothing inside her feels finished.
SINCE THEN
That’s what makes Percy so compelling. On paper, she’s built an entire adult life. She has a career. Friends. A version of stability.
But emotionally, she’s still organizing her life around something that ended a decade ago.
The next morning, that becomes impossible to ignore.
The first five years after leaving Barry’s Bay were filled with panic attacks. The next five were filled with emotionally unavailable men and relationships she never intended to keep.
The show isn’t particularly subtle about what it’s saying here.
Percy doesn’t believe she’s moved on. She believes she’s being punished.
That’s the thing about heartbreak. Sometimes the relationship ends, but the story you tell yourself about why it ended doesn’t.
And Percy’s version of that story seems to be that she ruined the best thing that ever happened to her.
The worst part is that she still thinks of Sam as the love of her life. Not a great love.
The love.
So when she decides to return to Barry’s Bay for Sue’s funeral, it doesn’t feel like a choice so much as an inevitability.
Sue is the reason she goes back.
Sam is the reason she can’t stay away.
The drive back is filled with the kind of dread that only comes from returning to a place that still has power over you.
the same
Everything is the same.
Which somehow makes it worse.
The town is still beautiful in that offensive way places can be. Completely indifferent to the fact that you’ve spent years becoming someone else.
Underneath all of it is the question Percy refuses to ask out loud: What happened to Sam after she left?
She’s spent ten years carrying the ending of their story like a punishment. And if she’s been trapped inside that ending all this time, it’s impossible not to wonder if Sam has been trapped there too.
She’s spent ten years carrying the ending of their story like a punishment.
And if she’s been trapped inside that ending all this time, it’s impossible not to wonder if Sam has been trapped there too.
2011
The flashbacks take us back to 2011, when Percy arrives in Barry’s Bay for the first time.
What’s striking isn’t that she’s young. It’s that she still believes her life is about to begin.
The lake feels enormous. The house feels magical. Everything is charged with possibility.
Looking back as an adult, there’s something painful about that kind of optimism. Not because it’s naive, but because you know how rarely we recognize those moments while we’re living them.
Then she meets Charlie and Sam.
Charlie is immediately charming. Sam is quieter and harder to read.
But the moment Percy starts talking, his attention shifts toward her.
And that’s what the show understands about first connections. They rarely feel dramatic at the time.
Most of us don’t remember the exact moment we fell in love. We remember the moment someone started paying attention to us in a way that felt different.
Percy’s response is equally recognizable. She immediately starts worrying she sounds stupid.
Which honestly feels like one of the most accurate portrayals of being a teenage girl.
The flashback ends, and the return to the present feels harsher.
Because now we know what Percy doesn’t.
We know this place is going to matter.
We know these people are going to matter.
And we know she’s going to spend the next decade trying to understand how she lost all of it.
That’s what makes Barry’s Bay feel so emotionally loaded.
It isn’t just a setting.
It’s a version of Percy she never stopped mourning.
THE RETURN
Percy immediately looks overwhelmed, which makes sense. Some places have the ability to collapse time. One minute, you’re an adult with a career and a carefully thought-out life. Next, you’re standing face-to-face with a version of yourself you thought you’d never face again.
Sue’s absence only intensifies that feeling.
The more we learn about their relationship, the clearer it becomes that Sue wasn’t just important to Percy. She was one of the few people who made her feel chosen. Which is part of what makes the guilt so difficult to resolve.
Percy didn’t just leave Sam behind. She left an entire family that loved her.
And that is a difficult reality for Percy.
When Chantal suggests Sue would have understood, Percy doesn’t seem convinced. That’s the thing about guilt: eventually it stops being about whether other people forgive you and becomes about whether you can forgive yourself.
By this point, the episode has made one thing painfully clear. Percy didn’t come back to Barry’s Bay because she’s healed.
She came back because she hasn’t.
And maybe the most relatable thing about her is that she keeps acting surprised by that.
Eventually, that unresolved history leads her back to Sam.
What makes their reunion work is how restrained it is. The show understands that seeing someone again after loving them isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just disorienting.
SAM
For ten years, Sam has existed as a memory Percy could revisit whenever she wanted. Seeing him again forces her to confront something she’s spent years avoiding: memory and reality are not the same thing.
The boy she loved is gone. In his place is a man who lived an entire decade without her.
And that’s one of the smartest choices the episode makes.
Up until now, we’ve experienced this loss entirely through Percy’s perspective. Seeing Sam again forces both Percy and the audience to consider something uncomfortable:
He had to survive it too.
Seeing Sam again is enough to remind us that Percy isn’t the only person who was changed by what happened ten years ago.
The episode starts widening its perspective in interesting ways. Up until now, the pain has largely belonged to Percy. But grief has shaped everyone in Barry’s Bay.
Charlie has turned himself into the kind of person who mistakes control for stability. Sam became a doctor, someone who carries other people’s pain even when he’s struggling under the weight of his own. Learning that he paused his residency to care for Sue before she died tells us almost everything we need to know about the man he became after Percy left.
Neither brother seems particularly good at processing grief. They carry it differently, but they’re both carrying it.
The show wisely undercuts all of this emotional heaviness with one of its funniest moments: Percy realizes she forgot to pack underwear and ends up buying children’s underwear at the general store.
It’s ridiculous, but it also serves as a reminder that life rarely pauses for emotional crises. You can be confronting the greatest heartbreak of your life and still have errands to run.
At the store, Percy runs into Delilah, who seems genuinely happy to see her. And somehow that feels more uncomfortable than hostility would have.
Forgiveness is difficult when you’ve spent years convincing yourself you don’t deserve it.
That feeling doesn’t last long. Delilah quickly starts questioning why Percy is back at all, eventually suggesting that Sue wouldn’t have wanted her at the funeral.
It’s a cruel comment, but it’s also revealing.
For the first time, we’re starting to see Percy the way some people in Barry’s Bay see her. Not as the woman who lost the love of her life, but as the woman who left.
That’s an important distinction.
Percy has spent ten years living inside her own guilt. Returning home forces her to confront the fact that everyone else has their own version of the story too.
CHARLIE
Charlie understands that immediately. When he admits he’s starting to regret inviting her, it doesn’t feel like a judgment of Percy so much as an acknowledgment of what her presence represents.
She hasn’t reopened an old wound.
She’s walked back into one that never fully healed.
If Charlie regrets inviting Percy back, it has less to do with Percy herself and more to do with what her presence represents. Everyone in Barry’s Bay has spent years building a life around an old wound. Her return forces them to look at it again.
Even people who barely knew the details seem to feel the weight of it. When Geordie pretends not to recognize Percy, it’s obvious he does. The reaction feels less like hostility than self-preservation. Nobody wants to get pulled into a story that never really ended.
The following morning delivers one of the episode’s strongest moments.
Season One Every Year After Reviews
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 1 Review: Every Summer After
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 2 Review: Young Blood
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 3 Review: Playing With Fire
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 4 Review: Anatomy of a Romance
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 5 Review: I Choose You
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 6 Review: Plan B
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 7 Review: The Boathouse
- Every Year After Season 1, Episode 8 Review: Goodbye…
Percy wanders back to her old house and discovers it’s being demolished.
What devastates her isn’t the building itself. It’s what the demolition represents. For years, Barry’s Bay has existed in her memory exactly as she left it. Seeing the house torn apart forces her to confront a reality she’s been avoiding for a decade: time kept moving without her.
I think that’s the central tension of the episode.
Percy has spent years treating Barry’s Bay like a preserved memory. But memories don’t stay frozen. The people inside them keep living.
Overwhelmed, she ends up back at the lake, where her grief finally catches up to her. When Charlie finds her in the middle of a panic attack and keeps repeating, “I’ve got you,” it’s one of the few moments in the episode where Percy allows herself to be cared for.
The scene works because it strips away all of her defenses. Beneath the guilt, the avoidance, and the years of trying to move on, Percy is still asking the same question she’s been carrying since she arrived:
Did I hurt him too badly to ever come back from it?
Charlie’s hesitation when she asks whether Sam hates her says more than any answer could.
Not because Sam hates her.
Because the damage was real.
UNDERSTANDING
Later, the episode shifts our understanding of the breakup significantly. Through Charlie, we’re reminded that Sam didn’t just lose a girlfriend when Percy left. He lost his best friend. He lost someone who had become part of his family.
That’s what makes the situation so much messier than a typical romance. Percy has spent ten years grieving what she lost. The episode finally asks us to consider what Sam lost, too.
That’s what makes Sam’s pain so important to the episode. Up until now, we’ve been experiencing this story almost entirely through Percy’s perspective. We’ve watched her carry the guilt, the regret, and the belief that she lost the love of her life. But the flashbacks keep reminding us that Sam lost something too.
The scenes with Sue are especially effective because they show how completely Percy had become part of this family. She’s helping with dishes after movie nights, making friendship bracelets, and moving through the house with the ease of someone who belongs there. Looking back, it’s clear that when Percy left, she wasn’t just leaving a boyfriend behind. She was leaving an entire support system.
That distinction matters because it reframes the loss. Sam didn’t simply lose a relationship. He lost one of the people who made Barry’s Bay feel like home.
FLASHBACK
One flashback captures that dynamic particularly well. Sam admits he’s afraid he’s starting to forget his father, and Percy listens without trying to fix it. It’s a small moment, but it reveals what made their relationship work in the first place. Long before they were romantically involved, they were each other’s safe place.
That’s what makes their reunion so emotionally effective later in the episode.
Before heading to the tavern, Percy finds the friendship bracelet she made years earlier and slips it back on. It’s a small gesture, but it reflects something she’s been doing since she arrived in Barry’s Bay: trying to reconnect with a version of herself she thought she left behind.
When she finally sees Sam, the show resists the temptation to make the moment overly dramatic. She says his name. He turns around. Then he hugs her.
What struck me about the scene is how little anger exists between them. Given everything we’ve learned about their history, the show could have easily played the reunion as awkward or hostile. Instead, it feels like two people briefly forgetting the distance between them.
IT IS STRANGE
Percy immediately apologizes and insists she should be comforting him because his mother just died. Sam’s response changes the entire emotional dynamic of the scene.
“You are. Just by being here.”
The line lands because it quietly dismantles one of Percy’s core beliefs. For ten years, she’s acted as though she became a stranger to these people the moment she left. Sam’s response suggests that it isn’t true. Whatever happened between them, her presence still matters.
The conversation that follows is surprisingly ordinary. They fall back into an old rhythm, washing and drying dishes together the way they used to. On paper, it’s an insignificant scene. In practice, it may be the most revealing interaction in the episode.
Because for the first time, Percy and Sam aren’t relating to each other as memories.
They’re relating to each other as people.
That’s an important distinction. Throughout the episode, Percy has been confronting idealized versions of the past. The house she remembered. The town she remembered. The relationship she remembered. Sitting beside Sam in the tavern forces her to engage with the reality of who he is now rather than the version she’s been carrying around for a decade.
And for a brief moment, that reality feels hopeful.
Which is exactly why the ending works.
AND HE’S MOVED ON
Taylor’s arrival isn’t painful because she does anything wrong. She’s friendly, polite, and completely unaware of the emotional earthquake she’s just walked into. The scene hurts because her presence forces Percy to confront something she’s been avoiding since the episode began.
Sam’s life didn’t stop when she left.
That’s arguably the central realization of the entire episode. Percy returned to Barry’s Bay carrying the assumption that the past was waiting for her to confront. Not literally, but emotionally. She has spent ten years revisiting the same memories, asking the same questions, and replaying the same ending.
Meanwhile, everyone else kept living.
The soon-to-be-demolished house revealed that truth physically. Taylor reveals it emotionally.
I don’t think the episode is ultimately about first love. It’s about what happens when you realize the people you’ve frozen in memory were never standing still. They were building lives, forming new relationships, and becoming different versions of themselves while you remained attached to a moment that no longer exists.
And for someone like Percy, who has spent years defining herself through what happened in Barry’s Bay, that’s a much harder loss to confront than the breakup itself.
But sometimes growing up is realizing that the place you left behind didn’t stay frozen waiting for you. Sometimes the people you loved learned how to keep living.
And sometimes that’s the hardest thing to forgive.
OTHER THOUGHTS
- Jordie faking that he forgot Percy is mean
- Barry’s Bay is such a cute town
- Chantal is a good friend – she doesn’t take anyone’s crap
- Delilah is trash and a s*** stirrer
- I need to know what Percy did
- I think that Percy is so relatable, and that makes the show even better
- Sam’s reaction to Percy being there with Jordie and his reaction when he sees her – I am confused
- Again, I need to know what happened
- Delilah is horrible
- How Charlie sold the tavern out from under Sam is wrong
