Following six incredible, emotional episodes, we’ve reached the finale of Disclaimer*. It’s finally time to learn what really happened on Catherine Ravenscroft’s vacation—and if you’re familiar with Disclaimer*’s source material (Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name), you know that the reality is devastating. To very briefly recap the series up to this point: when Catherine (Cate Blanchett) was younger, she traveled with her son, Nicholas, to Italy. During their trip, she met a young man named Jonathan who died while saving Nicholas from drowning. Years later, Jonathan’s father, Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), published a book about the whole ordeal.

For the past five weeks, we’ve seen only glimpses of Catherine’s holiday. Those scenes occur from the perspective of Stephen’s book, which shows Catherine romancing Jonathan—and cheating on her husband, Robert, in the process—only to carelessly abandon him just before his death. We never knew what was fact and fiction in this story, since the series hid Catherine’s experience from the viewer. At long last, in the end of last week’s episode, she broke into Stephen’s house and demanded that he sit down and listen to her story. He’s ready to hear Catherine speak, but he’s also spiked her tea, so she’s short on time.

Thanks to Alfonso Cuarón’s stellar direction, the Disclaimer* finale is a striking conclusion to what we’ve called one of the year’s best television shows. Blanchett, Kline, and Cuarón have delivered career efforts for weeks now—and that absolutely remains the case in the last episode. Now, with access to Catherine’s memory, we have every puzzle piece—and, like Stephen, we can finally understand what happened.

Catherine’s Gutting Truth

Before Catherine passes out, she manages to explain everything that happened between her and Jonathan in Italy. Again, the book shows Catherine flirting with Jonathan; it appears as if he’s a meek young man who is coerced into having sex with a married woman. Then, when he grows too attached, she watches him drown without calling for help.

As Catherine dispels this account, she points out that Stephen’s late wife, Nancy, wrote the book based on a series of photographs—but she fabricated everything else. One of the pictures in question reveals Catherine posing in lingerie. Nancy assumed that she’d posed for Jonathan willingly, but in reality, he’d held Catherine at knifepoint.

That evening, Jonathan—who was stalking Catherine from afar—broke into her room. He threatened to harm her and her son if she didn’t do exactly as he said. So when he forced her to strip down to her underwear, she listened—and when he began taking pictures, she obliged. She feared Jonathan, as well as the idea of her son waking up and putting himself in further danger. “I did exactly as he asked,” Catherine tells Stephen, “hoping that he’d be satisfied…that he’d leave.”

But he didn’t. Afterward, Jonathan sexually assaulted Catherine for three and a half hours. As Stephen listens to her story, his expression flips from shock to defiance. His son does have a track record of poor behaviour, but Stephen is not ready to accept that he fathered someone so monstrous.

Stephen accuses Catherine of lying and is appalled to hear that she photographed her injuries and collected a sample of Jonathan’s sperm. She’d planned to report the crime, but then Jonathan died, so she destroyed the evidence. Later on, when she was back home in London, Catherine realised she was pregnant—but suspecting the father was Jonathan, she had an abortion.

Nancy was right in thinking that Catherine let Stephen die. But her perceived motivation was dead wrong. Catherine didn’t call for help because she didn’t want to help her assailant. He dove into the water to appear like a hero, but as she says, “the sea wasn’t on his side.” Just as Catherine finishes talking, the sedative kicks in, and she falls to the floor.

Stephen Heads to the Hospital

With Catherine incapacitated, Stephen goes to the hospital to kill Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). You’d think the man would take a second to think about what he heard, but no— delusion, denial, and pain have fully taken hold. Murder is still on the table. Somehow he manages to sweet-talk his way past reception and head straight for Nicholas. There’s just one problem: He’s awake. When Nicholas was out cold, Stephen felt less guilty about injecting his IV with Drano. But now that he’s conscious, the idea of killing him doesn’t sit quite right. Needless to say: Stephen is so far gone.

Still, he tries to kill Nicholas anyway. As Stephen readies the poisoned syringe, Nicholas mistakes him for his mother and reaches out for his hand. Realising that he’s facing a man trying to murder him, Nicholas delivers the hundredth gut punch of this episode—he asks Stephen to finish the job. It’s what makes him come to his senses. He puts the vial away and decides to finally leave the boy alone.

On his way out, Stephen runs into Nicholas’s father, Robert, and apologises. “I was wrong about everything,” he says. Meanwhile, Catherine wakes up, chugs a coffee, and hustles to the hospital. When she arrives, Stephen apologises again—and Catherine mistakenly believes Nicholas is dead. She drops to the ground in grief. Moments later, after hearing Nicholas is, in fact, alive, she runs straight to him, leaving Stephen and Robert behind.

I didn’t want you to think about it every time you looked at me.

Karma Comes for Robert

Robert scolds Stephen for refusing to verify the book’s claims before sending it out. It happens offscreen, but it appears that Stephen told him Nancy’s story was wrong. “Why didn’t you question it?” Robert demands. Then comes the nail in the coffin. “Why didn’t you?” Stephen retorts.

This entire time, Robert never once believed his wife was innocent. He was too distracted by the concept of her cheating on him to even ask what happened. After Catherine checks to see if Nicholas is truly okay, she finally has an honest conversation with Robert—even if he doesn’t deserve it. “I didn’t want you to see me differently,” she says. “I didn’t want you to think about it every time you looked at me.”

Robert apologises repeatedly, but it’s too late. Their marriage is over. “I know I should forgive you, but the truth is, I can’t,” Catherine says. “You’re managing the idea of me having been violated by someone far more easily than the idea of that someone bringing me pleasure. It’s almost like you’re relieved that I was raped. I don’t know how to forgive that.”

Stephen’s Photographs

When Stephen returns home from the hospital, he starts a fire and burns every copy of The Perfect Stranger, along with his wedding ring and his wife’s sweater. As he does so, Disclaimer*‘s omniscient narrator speaks to him. “You always knew Nancy dressed Jonathan up into someone he was not, and you colluded with her, ignoring all the clues that should have made you uneasy about him,” the voice says. “Your only defence is that you did it out of love, but that’s not much of a defence.”

As Jonathan’s photographs burn, Stephen plucks one out of the pile. Lo and behold, in the corner of the picture, he spots a reflection of young Nicholas as the boy watches his mother’s assault. There’s a shot of Catherine talking to him about what happened in Italy. He doesn’t remember anything, but he believes her—and now they can mend their fraught relationship. The series concludes with an image of Catherine and Nicholas embracing each other. There’s no true happy ending in this story, but Disclaimer* ends with a moment of hope—finding beauty in the possibility that, after all these years, Catherine and Nicholas can reclaim the loving relationship they once had.