tell me lies season 4 — does Lucy choose Stephen after leaked tape?
Major spoilers for the series finale. The emotionally volatile third season concludes the story arc of Lucy and Stephen in a way that looks like a choice — but ultimately reads like a release. Here’s how the leaked tape, the wedding fallout and the final road‑side moment determine whether Lucy ever truly picks Stephen.
Planned ending and the road to the finale
The finale was written as the end point for the show’s central group; the storytelling that led there threads betrayals, secrets and tangled loyalties through multiple timelines. The episode moves between a 2015 engagement party and the past that first entwined these characters, revealing how old decisions and hidden romances bubble up to explode in the present. Bree and Wrigley’s late‑blooming affair, Stephen’s law‑school trajectory and Pippa’s confession about her sexuality all create pressure on the group, but it’s Lucy’s leaked confession tape that becomes the detonator at the wedding.
The leak: when private pain becomes public
The episode pivots on the moment Lucy realizes a tape in which she admits to lying about being raped has been made public. She sees a classmate watching it and flees, knowing the lie is now out for everyone to see. At the same time, Bree stumbles on a photo that reveals who slept with Evan years earlier and is reeling from that discovery. These revelations complicate loyalties and spark confrontations that drive the finale toward the wedding — a scene staged to deliver both spectacle and moral reckoning.
That public exposure reshapes how characters respond. People close to Lucy have to confront what they knew, what they ignored and how they enabled patterns of behavior. The leak also underscores how social pain spreads faster than any attempt at repair; privacy collapses into spectacle, and Lucy is forced to navigate that fallout in real time amid the most performative section of the season: the wedding.
The ending: a choice that isn’t a victory
On the surface, Lucy does choose Stephen one last time. She stands by him at the wedding; she leaves with him; she goes with him to a gas station for coffee. That outward act looks like surrender. But the final beats flip the meaning. Stephen, who has spent the series needing to control outcomes and grab the last word, ultimately abandons Lucy. He drives off and leaves her on the roadside. That’s the crucial reversal: he gets to be the one to walk away, and in doing so he severs the cycle that would have kept Lucy tethered to him.
The creator has explained that this was intentional — the most freeing act for Lucy isn’t to have the last angry retort or to reject him outright, because his pattern is to come back if he’s rejected. By allowing Stephen to leave her, the show locks him out of the script that made him omnipresent in her life. The desertion at the gas station functions as liberation; Lucy’s choice to get in the car with him is the final yielding, but his exit is the paradoxical gift that lets her move on.
There’s also a small, odd touch that punctuates the series’ end: the last audible moment is not a line from Lucy or Stephen but a cat’s meow, a light, almost absurd punctuation to a heavy ending. That tiny sound underscores how life continues beyond dramatic closure — messy, ordinary and indifferent to the moral calculus the characters have been living through.
So does Lucy choose Stephen? She chooses him once more, but not in a way that cements their bond. The finale makes clear that the real choice is the new shape of Lucy’s life after he leaves — and that final abandonment is what finally frees her from the cycle he kept enforcing.
