I have to admit that seconds into this episode, I was already triggered.
I lost my mom when I was young, and over the past few weeks, I’ve watched my best friend lose hers. There is a particular sadness that comes with losing a parent—one that never feels entirely manageable. Grief has a way of making itself more real with every goodbye, every ritual, every moment that reminds you the person you love is truly gone.
We’ve been building toward Sue’s memorial for what feels like weeks in Every Year After, but I don’t know that I was emotionally prepared for it.
BEFORE THE MEMORIAL
What struck me most was Percy sitting in the chairs where she and Sue used to spend time together. When she looks beside her and sees Sue, the moment feels like permission. Percy has spent so much of this story running—from Barry’s Bay, from her mistakes, from the people she hurt and the people who hurt her. But in that moment, it feels like Sue is telling her what the audience already knows: stay.
Not because staying is easy, but because it is where she belongs.
Charlie is desperately trying to reach Sam, who has isolated himself on the raft. Sam is still reeling from everything he’s learned, and finding Percy and Charlie together in the boathouse only reinforced the worst fears already living inside him. His anger makes sense. In fact, what stands out isn’t Sam’s rage—it’s Charlie’s refusal to meet it with his own.
For perhaps the first time, Charlie isn’t looking for an escape route or a defense. Perhaps for the first time, he’s grown. He isn’t trying to win. He is trying to repair something.
Sam isn’t in a place where repair feels possible. He isn’t just grieving his mother. He’s grieving Percy, his brother, his trust, and the version of his life he thought he understood. He’s grieving a love that he thought he had a second chance at. Charlie is finally ready to fight for their relationship, while Sam only wants to be left alone with his pain.
SHE CAN’T DO IT
Then there is Delilah.
When Percy finds her hiding out at the motel, barely recognizable. She was a woman who always had everything together; it becomes clear that grief and loss have finally caught up with her too.
Delilah doesn’t want to go to the tavern.
She doesn’t want to face the memorial.
She doesn’t want to face any of it.
But what I love about Percy and Delilah’s friendship is that it has survived pain, and it is grounded more in honesty now. The ghosting, the resentment, the misunderstandings, the years apart—they’ve finally stopped pretending those wounds didn’t exist. This has resulted in them finding their way back to each other.
Percy does what she has spent years avoiding: she shows up.
She offers to prepare The Tavern before Sam and Charlie arrive. On the surface, it’s a practical gesture, but it feels much bigger than that. Percy isn’t just setting up a memorial. She’s honoring Sue. She’s honoring the people she loves. She’s honoring her history with Sam and Charlie. For the first time in a long time, she’s choosing to stay instead of running.
I think Sue would have wanted that. She would have appreciated that.
PERCY STAYS
In 2016, Percy decides she’s leaving.
After everything that happened with Charlie and Sam breaking up with her, staying in Barry’s Bay feels impossible. She tells Sue she’s quitting and heading back to Seattle. In Percy’s mind, there’s nothing left for her there except embarrassment, heartbreak, and pain she doesn’t know how to face.
Sue, however, is having none of it.
She asks what is wrong with everyone lately. Charlie packed up and left that morning, claiming he needed to get back, and now Percy is trying to run too.
Percy tells Sue that Sam broke up with her.
In true Sue fashion, she doesn’t judge. She acknowledges that things have been hard and reminds Percy of something important: the Florek boys don’t own Barry’s Bay.
The town belongs to Percy too.
It’s such a simple statement, but it changes everything. For so many summers, Percy has been measuring her place in Barry’s Bay through Sam. Through who loved her, who left her, and who broke her heart. Sue reminds her that her connection to the town exists outside of all of that.
So Percy stays.
In the present, Percy arrives at the tavern to prepare for Sue’s memorial and finds herself surrounded by Amazon boxes and unfinished tasks. Instead of running, she rolls up her sleeves and gets to work. It’s a small moment, but it reflects how much she’s changed. The girl who once wanted to escape is now trying to show up.
SHE’S LIKE AN ONION WITH MINT CHIP
Meanwhile, Chantal is preparing to leave town when she runs into Jordie at the motel. Officially, they’re discussing billing issues. Unofficially, they’re avoiding the conversation neither of them wants to have.
Chantal admits Barry’s Bay changed something in her. Before this trip, life was work, structure, and obligation. Now she wants a work-life balance and has seen what that actually looks like. More importantly, she’s questioning whether the life she’s built back home is the one she truly wants.
A lot of that has to do with Jordie.
He listens. He pays attention. He makes things feel easy.
That simplicity is exactly what makes him dangerous. That “chill” is what makes her want to be around him all the time.
After Chantal leaves the office, she runs into Sam. She offers her condolences. Through stories and memories, we’re reminded that Sue was an emotional center of this community. But we’re also reminded that her sons were her life.
Sam and Jordie talk, and underneath the conversation is Sam, filled with pain, a man whose entire life has unraveled in a matter of days. He’s changed. At the start of the week, Sam had a future. He had a girlfriend he was preparing to propose to, a mother he could still see, a brother he trusted, and an ex who existed safely in the past.
Now all of those things were gone.
What we see is that Sam isn’t just grieving Sue. He’s grieving certainty. The life he thought he understood has been dismantled piece by piece. No matter how much he had planned, everything was gone.
It had changed.
Growing up is often sold as gaining answers, but it is also realizing how many things you never understood in the first place.
THE SETUP
Percy is in the middle of setting up for Sue’s memorial when she finds a tutu and a tiara.
Naturally, she puts them on. They are ridiculous, and yet they are essential, because she learned the glory of them from Sue.
It’s exactly the kind of thing Percy would do, and more importantly, exactly the kind of thing Sue would have appreciated. There’s always been something about Percy that understands how absurdity can soften pain. Not erase it. Not fix it. Just make it easier to carry for a moment.
Then she hears Sam’s voice, and her first instinct is to hide. Unfortunately for Percy, a tutu and tiara don’t exactly lend themselves to stealth.
Sam walks in and immediately asks what she’s wearing.
The moment pulls Percy back to an old memory from after their breakup. She and Delilah were making breakfast for dinner—waffles, French toast, anything comforting and familiar. It was one of those nights when Percy was trying not to think about how badly her heart hurt.
That’s when Sue confessed a secret: she actually hated pierogis. Everyone thought they were her favorite food, but after being forced to eat far too many by her grandfather as a child, she’d spent years pretending to love them. But she’d never eaten one again.
The memory feels oddly connected to the tutu and tiara. Both are reminders that sometimes survival isn’t about profound wisdom. Sometimes it’s about finding something that will give you enough love to make you laugh when you feel like falling apart.
Percy tells Sam she’s just there to finish setting up, and then she’ll leave.
To her, that feels like the respectful thing to do.
To Sam, it feels like another goodbye.
He tells her to stay.
Percy argues that helping with the memorial is enough. She came back. She honored Sue. She did what she needed to do.
Sam seems conflicted. His purpose isn’t clear.
He’s talking about Sue.
He’s talking about them.
He’s talking about the fact that Sue would have wanted Percy there.
Neither of them is really discussing the memorial anymore. They’re talking around everything else. Around the hurt. Around the betrayal. The heartache is there and they are talking around the love that neither of them has managed to extinguish despite ten years of trying.
You can see it all over Sam’s face. The grief. The exhaustion. The longing.
For all his anger and the pain, there is still a part of him that wants to walk across the room and let Percy hold him together for a minute.
That’s what makes this relationship so complicated. Percy hurt him. Charlie hurt him. The past hurt him. But none of those things have changed the fundamental truth that hurts Sam the most.
Sam loves Percy.
And for all the reasons he thinks he shouldn’t, he always has.
DISCO BALL SPEECHES
As Percy finishes setting up The Tavern, her eyes drift to the empty spot where the disco ball used to hang.
The absence catches her immediately.
Years earlier, she and Sue had spent an evening in the tavern baking breakfast food, playing pool, and trying to make sense of lives that weren’t unfolding the way they expected. At some point, they decided the place needed a disco ball. Not because it made sense. Because it made things better.
That was Sue’s gift. She understood that joy wasn’t something that arrived after grief. Sometimes it was something you built in the middle of it.
That night, Sue admitted that when her husband died, she had no idea how to survive it. She was angry. Lost. Drowning in a future without the man she loved, and that was something she never wanted.
Percy had asked the question everyone asks when they’re suffering: How do you get through it?
Sue’s answer stayed with her.
You either give up and let yourself go under, or you fight like hell to find your way back.
And when you do find your way back, life becomes beautiful again. Not because the pain disappears. Because you learn how to carry it.
Then Sue gave Percy one final piece of advice. If she ever got lost, all she had to do was dance like nobody was watching.
After all, nobody was.
The disco ball becomes less of a decoration and more of a declaration. A reminder that grief and joy have always lived side by side in this place.
The memorial itself is almost impossible to watch without breaking.
Sam’s speech isn’t really about death. It’s about love. About finding your best friend and holding onto them while you can. About the people who become home. When he begins to falter under the weight of it, I feel myself falling apart right alongside him.
What stood out wasn’t just Sam’s grief. It was who moved toward him.
Charlie.
Jordie.
Neither hesitates to be there for Sam.
The fractures between everyone seem smaller than the loss they’re carrying together.
Then Charlie gives his speech. Unlike Sam, who remembers love, Charlie remembers conflict. His strongest memory of his parents is their fighting. Even that becomes its own kind of tribute. His parents fought because they cared. They stayed engaged with each other, even when it was messy.
Charlie turns that memory into a plea.
Fight for your family.
Fight even when it’s hard.
And he’s looking directly at Sam when he says it.
Charlie stops asking for forgiveness and starts asking for connection.
It’s hopeful.
BROTHERS
Sam’s looks torn.
The anger and betrayal are still there.
But so is the love.
It is devastating. Nobody’s feelings have changed. Nobody’s pain has disappeared. Nothing is resolved.
For a second, it feels like everyone is standing close enough to see a path forward.
Inside The Tavern, Sam finally approaches Charlie. It’s one of the first conversations they’ve had all week that isn’t fueled entirely by anger. But even that feels terrifying – because Sam seems numb.
Sam acknowledges everything Charlie did to help him. It’s a small moment, but it matters because for the first time since the truth came out, they’re speaking as brothers instead of opponents.
They start talking about something surprisingly familiar: texting their mom. They speak of messages you send even after someone is gone. Not because you expect a response, but because part of you can’t quite accept that there never will be one.
They both know the truth. Sue isn’t coming back. No text will ever be answered. No call will ever be returned. Yet neither of them seems ready to stop reaching for her.
As they talk, another realization settles over the conversation. Their mother held more together than either of them understood. She wasn’t perfect. She struggled in ways they didn’t always see. But she was the bridge between them.
Now she’s gone.
In losing her, they’re discovering just how much of their relationship existed because she kept pulling them back toward each other.
Sam admits something that feels painfully honest.
For all of Charlie’s flaws, for all his recklessness, Sam always knew his brother was there.
That’s what makes the betrayal so devastating.
It’s not simply about Percy.
It’s about losing the person who felt permanent.
Sam looks at Charlie and admits that he feels like an orphan now. Then he looks at his brother and says the thing that’s really been haunting him:
“Now I don’t even have you.”
It’s a brutal statement, and it lands exactly the way it’s meant to.
THINGS BROKE
The thing is, Sam has every right to be angry. Every right to grieve. Every right to feel betrayed.
But grief doesn’t automatically make every reaction fair.
What Charlie did hurt him deeply and deserves consequences. But there is a difference between holding someone accountable and erasing them.
That’s the tension sitting underneath this entire scene.
Charlie broke something.
But Sam is standing at a crossroads between punishment and forgiveness, and right now he can’t see the difference.
Not because he doesn’t love his brother.
Because he still does.
And sometimes the people we love most are the only ones capable of hurting us this badly.
Back inside The Tavern, Chantal asks Percy if she’s ever mentioned that she’s an excellent two-stepper. Apparently, one of her country music clients taught her years ago.
It’s exactly the kind of random fact that somehow feels important in a room full of grief.
So they dance. Because Sue always said that everything gets better with a disco ball and a little dancing. Maybe not fixed. Maybe not healed. Just easier to carry.
THE END OF BROTHERS
Across the room, Charlie sits alone, looking about as miserable as a person can look. Delilah notices immediately. She crosses the room and asks if he’s okay.
“I guess things didn’t go well with Sam.”
They both know that’s an understatement.
For the first time all day, Charlie admits what he’s really afraid of.
That he’s alone.
But Delilah doesn’t let him sit in that feeling. She reaches up and brushes her hand against his cheek. It’s a small gesture, but Charlie smiles for the first time in what feels like forever.
Across the room, Jordie sees it happen, and maybe that’s what finally pushes him forward. Charlie and Delilah have spent years circling old feelings; Jordie is standing in front of a chance to choose something new.
He walks over to Percy and Chantal on the dance floor.
“I emailed another bill,” he tells Chantal. “I think you’ll be happy with this one.”
“Good.”
Then he grins.
“I do expect a five-star review.”
Chantelle smiles.
“I’ll consider it if you dance with me.”
And he does.
Theirs isn’t a grand romance. It’s ease. Neither of them is performing. Neither is trying to be someone else. They simply enjoy each other. After a week spent watching relationships implode under the weight of secrets, guilt, and history, something is refreshing about two people who genuinely seem happy in each other’s company.
As Dolly Parton plays through the tavern, Percy keeps dancing.
Then she notices Sam watching her.
His eyes are still filled with grief. With hurt. With everything, neither of them has figured out how to say.
But there is something else there too.
The faintest hint of a smile.
Not forgiveness.
Not resolution.
Just recognition.
When she leaves, she sees him leaning against the Bronco as though he’s been waiting for her. Sam looks at her for a long moment before asking the question that’s been sitting between them all week.
I CAN’T FORGIVE
“Why did you come back?”
The conversation moves between then and now.
Between the summer Sam came back after breaking Percy’s heart and the present, where Percy has returned after helping break his.
Their history has always been defined by departures.
By people leaving and people coming back.
By finding each other again only after the damage has already been done.
In the present, Percy finally stops protecting herself from the truth.
She tells him she loves him.
Not carefully. Not strategically. Just honestly.
She loves him. She loves him despite everything that happened between them, despite the years apart, despite Charlie, despite Taylor, despite all the reasons she should have learned how to let him go.
She never did.
She tells him that when she lies awake at night, she thinks about him. She wonders if he’s happy. She wants to be part of his life. She always has.
Because that has never really been the problem.
The problem was never whether they loved each other.
It was everything they did while loving each other.
Later, after they’re wrapped up in each other’s gravity once again, the conversation becomes quieter.
More honest. Percy rests against him while neither of them pretends that being together for a moment fixes what happened.
Sam breaks the silence first, “I loved you.”
Percy closes her eyes, “I know.”
“You broke my heart.”
Sam’s words aren’t cruel. They’re exhausted.
They’re the truth.
“I know that too,” she tells him.
For a long moment, neither says anything.
Then Sam admits the thing he’s been circling all week. He doesn’t think he can forgive her.
Not because he doesn’t love her.
Because he does.
Forgiveness and love are not the same thing.
Love arrived easily.
Forgiveness never did.
Maybe it will someday. Maybe it won’t. Right now, he doesn’t know the difference.
THE OTHER GOODBYE
The memory shifts back to 2016.
Back to another goodbye.
Back to Sam returning after ending things and finding Percy already changed by what happened with Charlie.
He tells her he never stopped thinking about her. That every version of his future still had her in it. That everything he’s working toward only makes sense if she’s there beside him.
It’s everything Percy wanted to hear.
And it’s too late.
Because she knows something he doesn’t.
The future they imagined together no longer exists.
Everything has changed.
She can’t explain why.
She can only look at him and understand that sometimes love survives.
And sometimes timing doesn’t.
AS IT SHOULD BE
We watch, quietly, as everyone begins to put their lives back together—not neatly, not completely, but honestly for the first time in a long time.
Percy returns to writing, but this time she does it on her own terms. She goes back to reclaiming voice and structure after everything that has been reshaped by grief, love, and consequence.
She isn’t retelling mythology anymore—she’s reframing it through herself. Through what it means to be pulled between worlds, between versions of love, between the self she was and the self she’s becoming.
This time, the story is hers.
It gets published.
And somewhere in that distance between them, Sam reads it.
He reads it with something quieter—recognition. The kind that comes when you realize you are not just inside someone’s memory, but inside the way they survived you. There’s a small, private smile as he follows her voice on the page, as if hearing her speak again in a way he hasn’t been allowed to for a long time.
In Seattle, Percy receives a package.
The keys to The Tavern.
It is not framed as ownership or obligation, but as return. A symbolic handing back of something that was always more than a building—it was the place where all of them kept colliding with each other.
With it comes a message from Sam.
He calls her what he has finally learned to see her as: a goddess of this world.
It lands differently now. Not as idealization, but as recognition of someone who has carried too much for too long and still managed to become something whole on the other side of it.
It isn’t a perfect ending. It isn’t closure wrapped in certainty.
It’s something quieter than that.
Sam’s olive branch isn’t an answer. It’s a moment where the story between them still exists.
THE TAVERN
We’re back in Barry’s Bay, and Delilah’s vision for The Tavern is finally becoming reality. The reopening is approaching, the space is coming back to life, and for the first time in a long time, the future feels bigger than the mistakes that nearly destroyed everyone.
Percy is still the owner of The Tavern, exactly as she should be. There is something satisfying about that. After spending so much of the story believing she didn’t deserve good things, she’s standing inside a future she helped build.
Not everything is resolved, though.
She hasn’t heard from Sam.
In fact, she doesn’t expect to.
Jordie was the one who told him about the reopening. Sam hasn’t reached out, and as far as anyone knows, he isn’t coming back. The silence feels intentional. Not cruel, just reflective of where Sam is emotionally. He spent years burying his feelings, and now he’s carrying grief, betrayal, and heartbreak all at once. Some people run toward connection when they’re hurting. Sam has always run away from it.
The fact that he hasn’t contacted Charlie either says just as much.
Charlie, meanwhile, has done something almost unthinkable: he’s thrown himself into work. This is a man whose usual coping mechanism is distraction, fun, and avoidance. Watching him bury himself in responsibility instead feels like evidence that the fallout finally reached him. For perhaps the first time, he can’t charm his way around the consequences.
Perhaps for the first time, he wants to face them.
Then Jordie arrives, offering to help however he can.
It’s such a Geordie thing to do. He never needs to be the center of a scene. He just shows up.
Delilah immediately finds a job for him, disappearing to retrieve a stubborn lockbox that nobody can open.
And then Chantal walks in.
Technically, she’s there because she left her purse in Jordie’s car.
Practically, she’s there because she wanted another reason to see him.
Jordie and Chantal’s relationship continues to be one of the healthiest developments in the story because neither of them is pretending very hard anymore. The attraction is obvious. The comfort is obvious. The happiness is obvious.
So when Chantal casually announces that she likes Barry’s Bay, it’s impossible not to laugh. This is the same woman who spent most of her time there criticizing it, questioning it, and planning her escape. Barry’s Bay changes people.
Not because it’s magical.
Because it forces them to slow down long enough to figure out who they are when they stop running.
And whether they want to admit it or not, every single one of them has been changed by it.
THE HEART
Charlie is at work on a Saturday; his boss is in the office the way he always is—half avoidance, half discipline. When Charlie walks into the room, he notices a framed photograph on the wall. It’s him, Sam, and Percy on his father’s boat the day it broke down on the lake. He doesn’t know who put it there. He doesn’t need to. The point is that it exists.
That image becomes the anchor for everything Charlie is trying not to feel. Barry’s Bay has a way of keeping receipts, and this picture feels like one of them—an uninvited reminder that nothing here ever really stays buried.
Sam and Percy and the boat represent a version of life before everything fractured, before silence replaced honesty. It was a good memory. Charlie stands there longer than he should, trying to read meaning into it, as if understanding the photograph might let him undo what it represents. But there is no undoing it.
What he does understand, finally, is simpler and heavier: Barry’s Bay is the only place that has ever felt like home, not because it is safe, but because it is honest. Charlie, for all his avoidance, has never stopped belonging to it.
He turns to leave the office, still carrying the image with him. But something in him catches— the physical interruption of everything he has been holding off for too long. A sudden tightening, a breaking point that arrives without permission.
And that is where it ends: not with closure, but with him falling to the floor, suffering a heart attack.
YOU CAME HOME
Opening night at The Tavern carries the weight of everything that came before it.
It’s supposed to feel like celebration—something rebuilt, something returned to life—but for Delilah, it lands differently. At first, there’s relief in how well it’s going. The room is full, the energy is warm, and the tavern finally feels like itself again. But then she sees Jordie and Chantal talking, and something in her expression shifts.
It’s recognition of a story she thought she was still part of.
Jordie tells Chantal he doesn’t want murkey anymore. He wants her.
It’s simple, direct, and completely unguarded—the kind of honesty that doesn’t leave room for misinterpretation. Chantal responds the way she always does: with a mix of humor and clarity and an undertone of sarcasm that keeps things interesting. She jokes that she thought lake-life people were supposed to be chill.
They are.
But being “chill” doesn’t mean being detached.
It means being honest enough to admit when you’ve found someone you actually care about.
And Jordie likes her. Really likes her.
For Delilah, though, the moment hits harder than she expects. She thought she and Jordie were building toward something inevitable. Seeing him choose someone else doesn’t just redirect the present and the future.
At the end of the night, Percy is alone in the kitchen, doing dishes, trying to close out the noise of the evening in the simplest way possible.
That’s when she hears it.
A voice.
Broken. Familiar. Unmistakable.
She turns immediately, even before she fully registers why.
And there he is.
Sam.
Standing like a memory that refused to stay in the past.
For a moment, neither of them moves. The history between them sits in the space—everything they broke, everything they rebuilt, everything they still don’t know how to say.
Then Percy smiles.
“You came home.”
It isn’t a question.
Sam gives a small, uncertain smile in return, as if he understands the weight of those words but doesn’t yet know what he’s allowed to do with them.
And that’s where it pauses— in possibility.
Because love like theirs was never simple. It was never clean. It was never guaranteed to survive itself.
But it kept finding its way back anyway.
Because their souls kept fighting for it.
