Breaking Down the Shocking Twist Ending in Apple’s Lady in the Lake

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake

In Lady in the Lake, nothing is quite as it appears for Madeline “Maddie” Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), a Jewish housewife turned aspiring investigative journalist in 1960s Baltimore. For much of the Apple TV+ show, which is based on Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel of the same name, Maddie is obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the unsolved murder of Eunetta “Cleo” Johnson (Moses Ingram), a Black woman whose body was mysteriously found in the fountain of a park lake. But Maddie questions everything she thought she knew when she comes face to face with a very much alive and breathing Cleo in the final moments of the penultimate episode.

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In Episode 6, Maddie is in the hospital after being stabbed by Mrs. Zawadzkie, the mentally unwell mother and accomplice of Stephen Zawadzkie, the killer of Tessie, a young Jewish girl whose murder helps jumpstart Maddie’s journalism career. While Maddie recuperates, she has feverish hallucinations about her life and the murders of Tessie and Cleo, which cloud her perception of reality when she wakes up and meets Cleo, a person who has consumed her thoughts for months, for the first time in person.

While there’s little explanation offered for how or why Cleo appears alive before the episode ends, there’s no denying that she’s very much alive—and that Maddie will have to once again re-examine what she thought she knew about the disappearance of Cleo Johnson. In Episode 7, the show’s finale, all the answers to why Cleo faked her own death—and why she returned—are revealed. Here’s what you need to know about the shocking twist at the end of Lady in the Lake.

Is Cleo still alive?

Cleo is still very much alive. As she explains to Maddie in the hospital in Episode 7, she faked her own death, with the help of Reggie, to avoid being killed by Shell Gordon as a cover-up for the attempted murder of Myrtle Summer. Though the body in the lake was identified as Cleo, it was actually the body of her best friend Dora, who had died of an overdose the night that Cleo was supposed to be killed. Reggie and Cleo dressed Dora’s body in Cleo’s clothing and placed her in the park fountain, where they hoped her body wouldn’t be found. It was eventually discovered after someone sent a complaint about the fountain lights not working into the newspaper where Maddie worked. Because Dora’s body had been in the fountain for months, her face was unrecognizable, making it plausible that it was Cleo who had been murdered and left for dead.

What happens at the end of Lady in the Lake?

In the seventh and final episode of Lady in the Lake, Cleo returns to her former life for a moment, again with the help of Reggie, to secure proof that Shell Gordon has been running an illegal numbers game, so that Maddie can publish it in an exposé. Cleo offers Maddie this scoop in exchange for Maddie’s silence on Cleo faking her own death.

In order to do this, Cleo dresses in a disguise as a new male bookkeeper for Gordon, which allows her access to the hotel office where his racketeering records are kept. After Cleo takes the books, she sets fire to the hotel before leaving to meet Maddie for the final time, to give her the records. Cleo then leaves Baltimore for good with her two sons on a ship headed to Paris, while Maddie publishes her exposé of Gordon, which later becomes a book.

What happens to Cleo?

Following her departure from Baltimore, Cleo relocates to Paris with her two sons and fully assumes the identity of her late friend Dora. She fulfills Dora’s dream of performing as a nightclub singer in Paris—and in doing so, also fulfills her own dreams of singing that she had abandoned as a young girl. She’s joined in Paris by her husband, Slappy.

What happens to Maddie? 

Maddie’s investigative journalism about both Tessie and Cleo’s murders and her exposé of Shell Gordon help to launch her career as a storied journalist. At the end of the series, Maddie has published a book about the cases she helped to uncover as a journalist, happy with her decision to pursue a career as a writer. Although Maddie has already ended her marriage to her husband Milton Schwartz, she chooses to also break off her new dalliance with police officer Ferdie Platt.