The Ending In Short
Fair warning, this video spoils the entire novel by Carola Lovering, including the final twist. If you haven’t read it, go and watch my spoiler free overview first.
Here is the ending in one breath. In October twenty fourteen, Stephen DeMarco dumps Lucy Albright in a bar and gives her no real reason. Lucy then finally tells her mother the secret she has carried since high school. Three years later, at a friend’s wedding, Lucy works out that Stephen was the older man Macy Petersen was secretly seeing on the night Macy died. She asks him about Macy. He lies to her face. And she walks away.
Content note: this video mentions cheating, an eating disorder, drug use and a fatal car crash. I’ll keep it non graphic. If any of that is hard for you today, please skip this one and be kind to yourself.
Two Timelines
To understand the ending you need the shape of the book. It has forty-five chapters and an epilogue, and they alternate between Lucy and Stephen, so you are always inside one head or the other.
Two timelines run at once. The present is a single weekend in August twenty seventeen: Bree and Evan’s wedding in Tewksbury, New Jersey, where Lucy is a bridesmaid and dreading one particular guest. Only four chapters and the epilogue take place there. The past runs from twenty ten to twenty fourteen, from Lucy’s first week at Baird College to the night her relationship with Stephen ends.
So the ending has two jobs. It has to close the relationship, and it has to answer the question the whole book keeps circling, which is what Stephen really is.
Ten Days In October
The breakup takes about ten days. It starts with a phone call at three on a Tuesday morning. Stephen’s mother, Nora, has been stabbed near her home in Port Jefferson, and he rides the subway to Mount Sinai Hospital, where the family gathers around her bed. He treats it as an inconvenience. He has a torts exam at nine.
That same afternoon, Lucy gets a call from her friend Lydia. A friend of Lydia’s saw Stephen holding hands over a table at a hot dog place in the East Village with another girl. Lucy phones Stephen from Bryant Park. He admits to the dinner, says it was not a date, and cuts her off.
Then the silence begins. On Wednesday he cancels Thursday’s dinner with her parents. On Saturday, Lucy runs a half marathon in East Hampton, thirteen point one miles, without hearing from him. By Sunday night it has been seventy-two hours. He texts that he’s been at his father’s house. And on the following Friday he asks her to meet him at a bar called Dudley’s.
Dudley’s
Notice what Stephen is doing in his own chapter. After the hospital, he remembers the night Macy died, and a boy blowing pink bubbles on the subway sends him off the train, shaken. Then he takes his exam, eats a roast beef sandwich, and takes a call from Lucy.
Afterward he decides Lucy was always wrong for him, and he plans to ask the girl from the hot dog place on a second date. That girl is Jillian. The book gives no tidy reason for the breakup. It shows him wanting a fresh start, the way he always does.
At Dudley’s he does not even say her nickname. He says he can’t do this anymore. Something isn’t right. He wants something more. Stephen asks whether they really know each other. Lucy answers that she doesn’t know who he is. She walks out, goes home, and cries until her nose bleeds. Her roommate Bree finds her on the floor.
The Unforgivable Thing
Bree calls Lucy’s mother, and CJ turns up at the apartment at dawn and drives her toward Cape Cod. Somewhere on the highway, CJ starts talking about trust. And Lucy finally says it. You slept with someone. I saw you.
For eight years, the Unforgivable Thing has shaped Lucy. At fourteen, she came home early and saw her mother with Gabe Petersen, the tennis instructor she had a crush on. She told no one for years. Then, on a night in December twenty ten, she told Stephen, and he promised to keep it quiet.
Now CJ pulls over and cries. She says the affair lasted one month. And she reveals what Lucy never knew: her father, Ben, found out, because CJ told him herself. That trial in Boston that kept him away for two months was cover. He needed time to forgive her, and they chose not to tell the girls.
Lucy confesses her own sin too, selling her dead great aunt Marilyn’s jewelry and giving the cash to a church. CJ forgives her. They go home to collect Georgia and their father, and take Hickory’s ashes to the beach.
What Happened To Macy
Now the real twist, and it’s in Stephen’s chapter. The night is August sixteenth, two thousand eight, the end of high school, a going away party at his friend Carl’s. His girlfriend Jenna goes home drunk, and Macy Petersen picks him up. Macy is sober, and driving her brother Gabe’s manual Jeep. Stephen has been drinking, and she lets him take the wheel.
Macy gives him a piece of Bubblicious gum. While she is going down on him, the Jeep leaves the road and rolls twice. He knows right away that she is dead.
And then this is the moment that defines him. He does not call anyone. He thinks about college, law school and his future. He leaves Macy behind the wheel of her own car, walks three miles home, and sleeps. The police find her the next morning in the driver’s seat. He calls it his greatest stroke of luck. The song playing on the radio was Zombie, which is why he cannot stand it. It is also the song Lucy turns up in his car that summer in the Hamptons, while Stephen scowls and changes the station.
Remember how he describes himself earlier. As a boy he stepped on a cousin’s pet turtle and felt nothing. He says he knows about guilt, and it does not apply to him. Macy is that sentence, taken to its end.
The Pieces Lucy Already Had
What makes the ending land is that Lucy already holds the missing piece, and has for years. On the last night of Macy’s life, Lucy was drunk at a party, throwing up in a bathroom, and Macy held her hair back.
Macy told her she had just broken up with a boyfriend. She was seeing someone new, an older guy from Bayville. He sort of had a girlfriend. He said he was breaking up with her, but they were keeping it quiet. Then Macy refused a beer, unwrapped a piece of gum and said she was driving.
Bayville is Stephen’s hometown. The clues sit there for hundreds of pages. Lucy even half sees it on the bathroom floor in October twenty fourteen, with blood on her face. She says no. It was impossible. She shuts it out.
The Wedding
It takes until August twenty seventeen for the pieces to click. The ceremony is the first shock. Stephen sits in the fourth row staring at her, next to a girl with a diamond on her left hand. That’s Jillian, his fiancée, which explains why the bridesmaids were told there were no plus-ones unless engaged or married.
At the reception, Stephen finds Lucy right after Bree and Evan’s first dance. He tells her she looks hotter than the bride. She tells him congratulations. He asks her to take a walk. She says no.
Then Macy’s voice comes into her head. He’s no one you know. He’s this older guy, from Bayville. Lucy knows, the way you know a storm is coming. She turns on her heel and asks one question. Did you know a girl named Macy Petersen in high school?
He pauses, and his eyes smile. Doesn’t ring a bell. She knows he is lying. He asks why she asks. She shrugs and walks away.
What Lucy Does With It
So how does the book resolve this? It doesn’t, in the way you might want. There is no confrontation, no police report, no courtroom, and Stephen is still engaged to Jillian.
When Lucy calls CJ that night, she tells her everything about the weekend. The one thing she leaves out is what she knows about Macy, because it felt like a message meant only for her.
What she does decide is smaller and bigger. She realizes that to Stephen she was always a source of entertainment, a useful thing. She doesn’t even hate him anymore. And she tells CJ she wants to leave New York and go somewhere else to work out what she wants. The last image is Lucy smoothing her dress and walking back toward the band. Here is my take, and treat it as an opinion: the ending is about her taking back her story, not winning.
The Title
The title comes from the Fleetwood Mac song, Tell Me Lies, and the music runs through the whole book. Lucy grew up with Rumours, she and CJ both love Stevie Nicks, and the line about sweet little lies shows up in Lucy’s head the night she decides to stay away from the party where she’d see Stephen with Diana.
By the ending, the sweet little lies have stopped working on her. That is why the final conversation is so short. She doesn’t need his answer, because his lie is the answer.
Where To Go Next
That is the ending of Tell Me Lies. If you want the full chronological story, my summary covers every year at Baird. If you’re curious about the Hulu series, my book versus show video compares the changes. You’ll find the book page, with the complete timeline, at bookexplained.com. And tell me in the comments: did you suspect Stephen before the final chapters? Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
