The Last Thing He Told Me Creators Laura Dave and Josh Singer Explain That 'Purposeful' Change From the Book

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the finale of The Last Thing He Told Me, "Sanctuary." Read at your own risk!]

When her husband vanished, Hannah Hall (Jennifer Garner) was left with one note: "Protect her." In the end, she honored his wish — even if it meant sacrificing him.

In the finale of The Last Thing He Told Me, Apple TV+'s limited series adaptation of Laura Dave's novel of the same name, Hannah trades Owen's (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) safety for the safety of his daughter, her stepdaughter, Bailey (Angourie Rice). After learning that Owen originally went into hiding with a young Bailey years ago because he'd turned on his mob lawyer father-in-law, Hannah goes right to the source and confronts the mob lawyer himself. Nicholas Bell (David Morse), whose unassuming demeanor doesn't match the apparently powerful menace of the people who answer to him, agrees to let Bailey return to the only life she's ever known in California, but only if Owen never can. Rather than enter witness protection — where Owen can theoretically join them eventually, but Bailey's life will never be the same — Hannah takes the deal.

"I just so firmly believe it's the only choice, and it is," Garner told TV Guide. "It's taking Owen's instruction of 'protect her' as far as you can possibly take it. Protect who she is, protect her life as she knows it. Protect her from harm. There's so much encapsulated in those two words. And Hannah, she can hang her hat on it. She did it."

Hannah's decision is clear to her, even if she technically has no proof that Nicholas will keep his word or that Owen is right not to trust witness protection. But in a notable departure from the book, the show gives its audience some of that proof: The penultimate episode confirms that a mole is still feeding Nicholas information when he asks someone over the phone to "call our friend in the Marshals' office." For co-creators and husband-and-wife duo Laura Dave and Josh Singer, the change was all about affirming their main character's instincts. 

"We always wanted Hannah to be the smartest person in every room," said Dave — who, with Singer, spoke to TV Guide in April, prior to the writers' strike. "And not to suggest that [the mole] was necessarily Grady, but just to suggest that whenever you're involving large groups of people, Hannah was correct to be mistrustful of the system. We wanted it to be more purposeful that they would have been in trouble."

"I've been up in San Francisco working with a detective up there," Singer said. "I've been researching for this reboot of Bullitt we're working on. And he talks about how some criminals had people on all five floors of the hall of justice. So it felt like something that was very real and grounded."

For Singer, confirming that Hannah was right about the Marshals didn't mean sacrificing the ambiguity that makes the story compelling. "I think there's always going to be some ambiguity about whether Hannah made the right choice, because frankly the sacrifice she makes is enormous," he said. "Ultimately, this is the lesser of two evils. What's magical about the book and the series is that this is not your standard 'he's bad and so you never see him again,' or 'he's good and so they reunite.' It lives in the gray between that."

That gray area — seeing him again, but not fully reuniting — is summed up in the epilogue, when a bearded Owen briefly tracks down Hannah at one of her art shows five years later. "I always knew that wherever Owen was, he was watching over them," Dave said. "I worked on this book for 10 years on and off, and I kept tossing it aside. I couldn't figure out my way to the ending, and then one day I wrote that whole ending, and I was like, 'Oh, this is why.' Because I had to sacrifice him in a way that I wasn't emotionally prepared to do before I did it. But I liked the idea that he was watching over them, he was good, and yet. Which felt to me like the most human, painful, comforting, yearning moment for them as a family. That they would always be together and they would always be apart."

Bailey is left out of the almost-reunion; Hannah and Owen brush hands as he tells her he still loves her, but he disappears before his daughter sees him. Rice told TV Guide she believed Bailey was better off without reopening that wound. "I'm glad for her," she said. "I think it would be too much. She's still a young adult coming to terms with this different life. I think leaving it be is the best choice."

"Over time, I think they have come to such a place of radical acceptance that they stop looking for Owen," Garner added. But even if they've stopped looking over their shoulders all the time, the danger isn't gone. "The more they stop looking for Owen, the less they see the people that are still there watching them."

Still, whatever eyes are on them fade into the background in the show's final seconds, and The Last Thing He Told Me ends by trading lost family for found family. When Bailey, totally unaware of what Hannah just went through, arrives at the art show, the show refocuses on its central pair, whose intense experience since losing Owen has brought them closer together. "This is a story you think is really about Hannah and Owen, and then ultimately it's really about Hannah and Bailey," Singer said. "And the epilogue moves in the same way. You think it's about Hannah and Owen, but really, to me what the epilogue is about is the full-circle nature of the arc when Bailey says 'Mom.'"

"We imagine the series as a call and then an answer," Dave agreed. "So the very first word of the series, the very first line of dialogue, is Hannah calling out 'Bailey.' And the end of the series is that answer, which is 'Mom.'"

The Last Thing He Told Me is now streaming on Apple TV+.