Nicky is initially painted as a flighty, troubled mess who loses her son because of her refusal to get help for her addition issues. She doesn’t put up a fight when Adam takes custody of Ethan and moves to NYC, agreeing to remain in her small hometown and only see her son once or twice a year. But once Ethan is arrested in the present-day timeline, Nicky flies out to the city to offer both him and Chloe her support, and Chloe comes to realize that Nicky has changed — she’s still quirky and prone to risk-taking in a way people-pleasing Chloe never will be, but now Nicky is stable, clear-headed, and exactly who Ethan needs in his corner. She and Chloe repair their relationship, and in the process, truths about their childhood come spilling out.
Nicky informs Chloe that their father, an abusive alcoholic, made life a living hell for her and their mother, which they shielded the much-younger Chloe from. That echoes into Nicky’s marriage with Adam, when he starts abusing her, too. Thanks to evidence Chloe unearths while cleaning out Adam’s stuff, it’s heavily implied that the drowning accident that happened when Ethan was a baby was likely staged by Adam, who drugged Nicky and pretended Ethan almost died in order to gain custody and go be with Chloe in New York. Adam, it seems, lied about pretty much everything, and no one ever questioned him because of his meticulously crafted Good Guy façade.
Fortunately for Ethan, he’d been communicating with Nicky a lot more than Chloe and Adam ever realized, using a burner phone to call and text her almost daily for years. Ethan informed his mom that Adam was abusing Chloe, and after military school is brought up, Nicky decides enough is enough: she’s going to drive out to the Hamptons in secret and surprise Adam with a face-to-face confrontation. She does exactly that, but when things escalate, she stabs him with her dad’s old buck knife. (Which she brought with her to do . . . hmm. It’s giving premeditated, Nicky!) Ethan comes by the house that night to grab his sweatshirt, witnesses the aftermath, and helps mess up the house to make it look like a robbery went sideways. Chloe puts it all together after Ethan is found not guilty in court, and Nicky admits to it all. They agree to put it behind them and start a new journey together, as sisters, survivors, and co-parents.
Of course, there’s one more thing left on Chloe’s to-do list before they can embrace a happily ever after . . .
Who is found guilty of Adam’s murder in ‘The Better Sister’?
Ethan comes out on top legally, but the true crime-obsessed public still thinks he did it. That’s when Chloe takes matters into her own hands, planting the knife Nicky used to kill Adam in the home of Bill Braddock, her magazine’s longtime lawyer, a close personal friend of the family, and most importantly, Adam’s boss. Bill had been helping numerous corporate clients engage in high-level international bribery schemes, which Adam was in the process of exposing to the FBI. Chloe finds Adam’s extensive notes on the illegal operation in his files, which gives her the idea to plant the knife and tip off the cops. (She figures he would’ve tried to take Adam out anyway.) Once that’s done, the heat is taken off of Ethan for good, and Bill winds up in prison.
The end!
