The final chapter of Laura Lippmans Lady in the Lake is in Cleo’s voice. Years after the events in 1960s Baltimore, she still talks to Maddie in her mind. “Did I tell you everything? No. I didn’t want to share my secrets with you, Maddie Schwartz. Who could blame me? You were careless with my life and my death.” In adapting Lippman’s novel for the screen, Alma Har’el seems to have focused on this line, viewing it as a narrative challenge. What would it have meant to tell Cleo’s whole story? What would it have meant to test how careless Maddie could be with Cleo’s life? And Death?

The novel ends with Maddie’s coup of a first-person narrative about her gruesome stabbing, which leads to a role in the beacon, which led to a fabulous career as a first-class journalist. Cleo’s whereabouts and the many details of her story remain vague. Not so in Lady in the Lakewhose final episode is aptly called “My Story”. Cleo will not just be a narrative crutch for the character development of a young, dissatisfied suburban wife. She is not a mere plot device through which Maddie’s own life is reflected. Here she is a fully developed woman whose freedom of action is the focus.

So yes, after a dreamy penultimate episode, My Story takes the narrative lead away from Maddie and hands it back to Cleo, answering all of our unanswered questions.

We first flashback to 1952, when Dora and Cleo are hoping for their big break. There’s a talent show (at Shell Gordon’s premises, no less!), and after being smuggled in through the back door in exchange for a nice long kiss, the pair hope to finally make their dreams of stardom come true. But when they catch the eye of a comedian there (that would be Slappy), the pair are caught and sent to Gordon’s office. There, Cleo impresses the impresario for the first time with her knack for numbers: if she takes over his books (as her father once did), he’ll let her get away with it. It’s a simple arrangement, but one that Cleo can’t shake once they’re back downstairs. She urges Dora to go on stage without her, which of course she does, and charms everyone in attendance with a beautiful rendition of “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” It’s a Sliding doors Moment for the young woman, the night when everything could have been different.

Because as we soon find out, that night sealed the fate of both of them in many ways. Dora, in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, was the actual “Lady in the Lake,” having overdosed before her performance on Christmas. And since Reggie had been tasked with killing Cleo, the two had hatched a plan that would easily solve all of their problems: If Reggie dumped Dora’s body in the lake along with Cleo’s clothes, the water damage to the body would make it nearly impossible to tell the difference. It would give Reggie the opportunity to tell Shell that he had taken care of Cleo, while Cleo could start a new life that would give her little boy the better life she had dreamed of. It was, as it turns out, a pretty good plan… had a certain Ms. Maddie Morgenstern not decided to delve into that titular character and slowly untangle the many loose threads Reggie and Cleo left behind.

Maddie learns much of this while she is still recovering in hospital, where Cleo, in full nurse’s uniform, tells her just enough to give her a warning: let her story rest. Yes, Cleo had sent the letter that had set everything in motion (which was sent to the “Helpline” column in star), but now she wanted the budding reporter to let it go. “You have to stop,” she pleads. She even offers her a bigger story: “I want to take down Shell Gordon.” And Maddie can have that cover story all to herself.

But we all know Maddie. She’s not one to give up. Or to listen to other people’s advice, let alone the advice of others. And when she’s back home and meets up with Ferdie in the diner downstairs, she insists that she has to keep going. Ferdie might want to talk about the possibility of a future together (and hints at what will soon be the Loving v. Virginia SCOTUS decision), but the ambitious divorcee is determined. “I feel like I just woke up from a dream,” she tells him. “I’m still immersed in the story. I have to see this through.”

Sells her survival scoop, a signature line, to the starMaddie gets the paper that allows her to further investigate Cleo Johnson’s murder. This eventually leads her to talk to Slappy, who is still in prison for a murder that Maddie now knows no one committed. But even though she thought he would help her if she learned what the mother of his children did, he is determined to keep up her charade. It’s a beautiful moment, played with grace and tenderness (and righteous anger) by Byron Bowers, who makes a simple gesture like the prison phone tapping on the windowpane that separates Slappy and Maddie a thing of beauty.

Meanwhile, Cleo and Reggie (who has been helping her sons in her absence) set out to pull off a thrilling heist that will hopefully help bring down Shell Gordon. As always, the plan is both simple and implausible: disguised as a man, Cleo will accompany Reggie as they head to the Gordon Hotel, where the books (real and fake) are kept in the vault. They must extract enough of them (and destroy the rest) so that Maddie can prove all of Gordon’s crimes (including rigging the numbers game and planning the assassination of Myrtle Summers). Their plan depends on Teddy, Cleo’s son, distracting Shell Gordon while Cleo (with painted moustache and wig!) goes to the vault with Reggie and, just as they are almost discovered, sets fire to the books they leave behind.

The fire is enough of a clue for Gordon, who finds Reggie (who encouraged Cleo to leave him behind) in the bar, happy with the decisions that led to this tête-à-tête. He’s a man resigned to defying his boss in the hope of making amends for the death of his beloved Dora – and giving Cleo a chance to start a new life in the process. Set to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman,” the entire sequence is thrilling, giving Cleo the fiery agency she lacked in the novel, where she remained a small part of Maddie’s life and story.

Here she takes her life back, drives off in a car with Teddy, and eventually starts a new life in Paris with Slappy after giving Maddie enough evidence to bring down Gordon’s entire operation, which it does. It finally gives Maddie the courage to tell Ferdie she doesn’t want to be his (or anyone’s) wife, and moves to a new place where she will presumably leave everything to do with Cleo and Tessie behind and finally start over. The show then moves quickly: MLK Jr.’s assassination, the Pharaoh closing, Cleo and her kids on a boat to Paris, and Slappy getting out of prison. All of this imagery quickly foreshadows the end of this delicate story.

And then the coup de grace.

As the images switch between Cleo singing in a bar in Paris and on a float during a Thanksgiving parade in Baltimore, we see two women who have wrested their stories from the men around them and lived the lives they always wanted. “We both paid a different price for our freedom,” Cleo tells Maddie, but the story is more complex here than in Lippman’s closing chapter. The heartache and resilience (not to mention the winking sensuality) that Moses Ingram brings to the final notes of “Feeling Good” are paired with a pained expression on Natalie Portman’s face. Maddie, now older, is promoting her latest book. On the outside, she may seem content and satisfied (look at her fashionable ensemble and her unruly, if perfectly coiffed, hair!), but Har’el leaves us with an ambivalent expression, the expression of someone who has written the story he always wanted to write, and yet cannot escape the fact that it is not true, not real. Whereas in the novel, Maddie basked in her success and wondered about Cleo, here we are allowed to see what happened to Cleo and instead wonder what lies behind Maddie’s inscrutable expression.

• Speaking of comparisons to the original, Har’el was obviously quite liberal with her adaptation. For example, she cut out an entire subplot about Cleo’s affair with another man! And I have to say, it was a nice way to reinterpret what I often felt was a blind spot in the original novel, by secretly making the whole show dependent on Maddie’s own meager ambition, where in the end Mrs. Schwartz really only benefits from Cleo’s “life and death” with little regard for the former and little respect for the latter.

• “You think every story is your story”; what a read when you read it from your own son! But Seth is not wrong.

• I almost wish Maddie hadn’t given Judith a present (who deserved a little more narrative space!) The Diary of Anaïs Nin, a book that was clearly a totem for Lady in the Lake and for character and creator alike. It made things a little too obvious, but the show has clearly chosen to be operatic in its self-seriousness, so I can’t blame Boaz Yakin (who wrote this episode) too much for that.

• Can we start the campaign to Lady in the Lake Soundtrack? It feels unfair not to be able to hear Moses Ingram’s soulful rendition of “Feeling Good,” which is the thrilling climax of the series. And while we’re at it, we’d like to give credit to Marcus Norris for giving us arguably one of the most distinctive soundtracks of the year (those whistles in the opening credits are pretty unmistakable!).