Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Better Sister episode 8 and references to domestic abuse from this point forward.
Following Nicky's bombshell reveal at the end of episode 7, The Better Sister episode 8 opens with a flashback to how it all went down. Nicky sits in her car across the street from Adam and Chloe's house and watches Adam get out of a cab. She steels herself to ring the doorbell, and even though Adam isn't happy to see her, she barges inside looking for Chloe. She confronts him about abusing Chloe and refuses to leave, which turns the situation violent.
Adam grabs Nicky and tries to pull her out of the house. The fight continues until Nicky pulls out a pocketknife and stabs Adam multiple times in self defense. When he collapses, she retrieves the knife from his hand and rushes out in a panic. Prior to killing Adam, Nicky had delivered groceries to his mother when she received a phone call from Ethan alerting her about the abuse. She throws her phone, breaks the screen, and leaves it at her ex-mother-in-law's house.
With nothing to lose, she grabs provisions and map and hits the road to her sister's house. The rest is, as they say, history. She cleans up her wounds and ditches her clothes in a public bathroom before changing and returning to Cleveland. Later that night, she gets a call from the police about Adam's murder. When recounting the story to Chloe, she admits that either her or Adam would have died in that altercation and she killed him in self-defense. Chloe won't allow Nicky to go down for this, though.
What the Gentry Group was really up to
While Chloe and Nicky enter survival mode, Nan continues to close in on Nicky. She looks into Adam's mother, Debbie, and decides to head to Cleveland to speak with her without letting her boss know. Chloe sends Nicky out with Ethan while she figures out what to do with the gun, pocketknife, and new information. Jake drops by and informs Chloe that Bill fired him and that Olivero had been blackmailing him. He also reveals that Gentry Group was exploiting laborers, basically human trafficking, and Braddock was helping. Adam was trying to take them down.
Knowing that Adam would have kept a paper trail, Chloe searches the house for physical files and finds them and a recording of Bill hidden in the faulty bottom of their safe. She also calls the FBI to file an anonymous complaint about Agent Olivero. Nicky takes Ethan to the lake, but she allows him to take the car to spend time with a girl he likes. Nicky and Ken go back to his house and share an intimate moment, but it's interrupted when reality sets back in.
Chloe pays a visit to Bill's home, under the guise of bringing him and his husband gifts. However, she didn't just bring any old gift. She brings him the Gentry Group files and makes a big deal about getting back to normal and leaving all of this in the past. She's a great actress. But as the end of the episode later reveals, Chloe made copies of the files and stashed the pocketknife in his desk. Bowen receives some interesting information that leads to getting a search warrant for Bill's home office.
Chloe and Nicky get away with murder
Nicky finally learns the truth about what happened with Nan, that she shot the wrong person in a case and the police department covered up what happened. Ironically, Nan's drop-in at Adam's mom's house brings some interesting revelations, such as Nicky leaving her phone there and Nicky telling Debbie that Adam was stabbed. That information wasn't shared with Nicky. Nan wants to check a DNA match between Nicky's cigarette and Adam's clothing, but after Catherine publicly spreads the story about Nan's past, she's pulled from the case and all of her progress is halted.
On the way home, Nicky and Ethan talk about the future. Nicky considers returning to Cleveland, and Ethan wants to go with her. He also admits that on the night of the murder, when he staged the break-in, he heard Adam still breathing. Even though he could have called for help and saved his father, he didn't and left the house. He's carrying around that guilt. Nicky's also frustrated about the potential book deal that Chloe didn't tell her about yet. Their tense conversation forces Chloe to be specifically vulnerable and honest about Ethan and Nicky being the only ones who matter to her.
Before they sit down for dinner, the news runs a breaking story about Bill Braddock being arrested in a possible connection to Adam's murder. Chloe and Nicky successfully pulled off the redirection scheme to ensure that Nicky wouldn't be implicated in the murder. Bill might not have been guilty of killing Adam, but he was guilty of other crimes. In the final sequence of the series, Chloe and Nicky smoke by the fire and reflect on their sisterhood as it's revealed Jake was killed. Their story had collateral damage, but in the end, they managed to come out unscathed.
Watch The Better Sister only on Prime Video.