In Season 4 of Netflix’s gripping series “You,” Kate Lockwood (played by Charlotte Richie) becomes the focus of Joe Goldberg’s (played by Penn Badgley) infatuation—and she’s equally drawn to him. As the season wraps up, they’re married and settling in New York City for Kate to take control of her father’s business following Joe’s murder of her dad. Yet, the course of love is rarely smooth, and by Season 5, although still married, Kate wishes Joe dead, especially after he murders her uncle at her urging. That action snaps her back to reality, helping her see that Joe is far from her Prince Charming.

No longer entranced by Joe, Kate teams up with Season 4’s Nadia Farran (Amy-Leigh Hickman) and Season 3’s love interest Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle) to imprison him in the glass cage beneath his bookstore, Mooney’s. Just as Kate is ready to execute Joe, the situation turns around; he escapes, disarms her, and ends up injuring her with a gunshot to the abdomen. The arrival of Maddie Lockwood (Anna Camp), who sets the bookstore ablaze, complicates things further.

Despite the grim circumstances, Kate survives the ordeal—not owing any thanks to Joe or his new romantic interest, Bronte (Madeline Brewer). Although Kate and Joe once vowed to improve each other’s lives, that promise disintegrates like the smoke surrounding them. Kate doesn’t lament Joe’s eventual arrest; instead, she rejoices in emerging from the chaos, ready to take charge of her own future.

We don’t really know how Kate survived the fire, just that she did. She appears in a coda in the Season 5 finale episode, titled “Finale,” and we see a glimpse of her life after Joe goes to jail — but in the bookstore in Episode 9, “Trial of the Furies,” things don’t look so good.

Bronte comes into the bookstore after it goes up in flames and finds Joe and Kate lying side by side. Bronte tries to save Kate first, but between the fact that Joe shot her and the subsequent fire, Kate is unresponsive. So Bronte helps Joe out of the store while leaving Kate behind. Kate’s prognosis doesn’t seem rosy, and since the fire department and paramedics don’t make it to the bookstore that quickly, it seems surprising that she survives at all. However, we don’t know how much time passes until that day when we see her in the coda or what she had to do to survive, so it’s possible, it just doesn’t seem exceedingly likely.

Charlotte Richie, who has played Kate since Season 4, said she would have been fine with Kate dying, because like Joe, her character did some truly terrible things. “I really don’t believe in people dying because they’ve done bad things, but in the world of the justice of this show, there’s such a redemptive element to Kate’s demise that it would’ve been OK,” she told Business Insider. “She’s done some pretty dastardly things and she’s got herself into scrapes and been responsible for a lot of people’s downfalls.”

Bronte narrates the coda at the end of the “You” Season 5 finale, covering everyone who survived Joe’s reign of terror. And though it’s the first we hear of Kate since we saw her passed out as the bookstore went up in flames around her, it turns out she’s just fine. Kate does have burn scars from the incident, but Bronte informs us that she wears them proudly, like a badge of penance for what she survived.

Kate doesn’t take over the CEO job at her family’s company again. Instead, she leaves that to Teddy (Griffin Matthews), her half-brother, who informs her in the coda that he’s taken the company fully nonprofit. Kate is thrilled by this, though she herself is more interested in returning to her first love and what she was doing in London: running an art gallery. She’s particularly interested in helping Marienne, an artist that was affected by Joe but no longer fears for her life when she puts out her paintings.

Kate also gets custody of Joe’s son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio), who is a happy, seemingly well-adjusted child who will hopefully not make any of the mistakes that his father did.