🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) is one of You’s most unforgettable characters. Yet it’s also nearly impossible to remember everything Love did over multiple seasons of the deadly thriller series alongside eventual husband and co-conspirator Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) — and now she’s popped back up in Season 4. Love proved she’s capable of whipping up a gourmet meal for you, and also of poisoning you with it. She has layers. Love is a many-splendored woman.

After that shocking trailer appearance, Love’s loyal fans may be wondering: “Where did our Love go? And will she return?” Keep your love for Love alive with a complete reminder of how she lived, how she died and how she’s returned for Season 4. It’s a Love story for the ages.

Beth Dubber/Netflix

How did Joe meet Love? 

Love falls into Joe’s perfectly laid trap to kick off Season 2 of You. Fittlingly, their relationship is defined from the beginning by obsession, deception and romantic roleplay. Love is the daughter of Dottie (Saffron Burrows) and Ray (Michael Reilly Burke), the wealthy owners of luxury supermarket chain (and definitely-not-an-Erewhon knockoff) Anavrin. “Anavrin,” yes that’s Nirvana spelled backwards. Joe just so happens to get a job at Anavrin — read: stalks Love aggressively enough to slip into the gig — and quickly charms her. At first Love gets to know Joe by his stolen alias, Will Bettelheim. 

To help poor pale Joe feel better after his first LA sunburn, Love, a professionally trained chef, takes him on a food tour. Once she’s gathered enough data on his palate, Love prepares what she has deduced is Joe’s perfect meal: roast chicken with carrots and potatoes. This is one course of Love that does run smooth: Joe falls in love. Hard.

What follows is more complicated. There is will-they, won’t they tension, intense mutual feelings and Love eventually coming up with the phrase “I wolf you” as the couple’s take on “I love you.” The memory of Love’s first husband, the late James (Daniel Durant), eventually fades.

Beth Dubber/Netflix

Who is Love Quinn, really? 

Joe spends much of Episode 9 of Season 2 trying to piece together a trippy night with Love’s twin brother, Forty (James Scully), that ends with Joe finding his neighbor and former lover Delilah (Carmela Zumbado) dead in his plexiglass murder cage. Joe has killed before — this isn’t his first plexiglass murder cage, that one’s in New York — though he’s pretty sure he didn’t kill her? But Joe’s other ex Candace (Ambyr Childers) traps Joe in the cage and prepares to turn him in for the crime. But Candace is stopped. And then she’s murdered. By Love. Oh and, Love is also the one who killed Delilah. 

Surprise — Love kills. She’s just as scheming and bloodthirsty as Joe. That’s why she barely reacted when he admitted to using a fake name. As we learn in the Season 2 finale, Love has been “taking care” of people for years. Love’s first brush with murder came at age 14, when she got rid of the au pair who was drugging and sexually abusing Forty. (She let everyone believe he was the culprit.) Love had caught wind of Joe’s games prior: All the time Joe thought he was manipulating her into loving him, he was really a pawn in the game of Love. 

After killing Delilah and Candace, Love quickly comes up with a fairly effective plan to cover up her crimes, along with Joe’s own. But rather than recognizing Love as his equal — as she feels about him — Joe is horrified by her behavior. Joe attempts to kill her, but stops when Love reveals she is pregnant with their baby. 

Joe and Love end Season 2 married and awaiting their little bundle of joy in their new suburban mini mansion. Forty, meanwhile, is killed by the police.   

John P. Fleenor/Netflix

Where do Love and Joe move?

Season 3 leaves Los Angeles behind for the Silicon Valley suburb of Madre Linda. Love and Joe welcome a baby boy named Henry Forty Quinn-Goldberg… much to Joe’s dismay. He wanted a daughter. A new mom in a new place and training herself to live and laugh, Love falls in with the local parent group, led by momfluencer Sherry Conrad (Shalita Grant). 

As Love works to find her footing, Joe simply resents everything around him, his wife included, and her negative feelings worsen when Joe turns his obsessive sights on their next-door neighbor, Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus). 

John P. Fleenor/Netflix

Do Love and Joe live happily ever after?

No, Joe and Love are Joe and Love. The Quinn-Goldbergs’ time in Madre Linda — “Pretty Mother” — soon turns ugly. First, Love kills Natalie for the crime of being stalked by Joe. Love hurts particularly because Joe stole one of Natalie’s used tampons. (Early on in their relationship, he stole Love’s used tampon, and it always cuts the deepest when a cheater recycles his moves on someone else.) As a team, the Quinn-Goldbergs cover up Natalie’s murder and rebuild the cage — and hide keys in said cage, should their spouse turn on them. Trust!

Sadly, the death toll doesn’t stop at Natalie. Love hits anti-vax neighbor Gil (Mackenzie Astin) over the head with a rolling pin after his family infects Henry (and Joe, too!) with measles. After some time in the cage, Gil dies by suicide due to guilt over damning information Love and Joe share with him about his son. But Joe and Love’s plexiglass murder cage isn’t empty for long. Madre Linda is a really desirable neighborhood, and desire often goes awry. The cage is soon repopulated by Sherry and her husband, Cary (Travis Van Winkle), who’d overheard the Quinn-Goldbergs’ gruesome secrets during a foursome gone wrong. To make matters worse, Joe also fatally stabs local mini celebrity Ryan Goodwin (Scott Michael Foster). 

See, the problem is that Love and Joe aren’t faithful to one another during their codependent crime spree. Joe finds a new romantic fixation in Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle), a sweet librarian and single mom; Ryan is (or at least was) her abusive ex. Love is crushing on Theo Engler (Dylan Arnold), Natalie’s stepson and the literal boy next door. Literally  crushing, too: Love ends up bludgeoning Theo and leaving him for dead. 

John P. Fleenor/Netflix

Did Love really die? 

The mounting complications in Madre Linda come to a head at one very fraught Quinn-Goldberg dinner in the Season 3 finale. The main course is, naturally, roast chicken. Love admits her first husband, James, wanted to leave after she cared for him throughout a bout with cancer. She gives James aconite, also known as wolfsbane, hoping to paralyze him long enough that the two of them could “talk through” their problems. But she misjudges the dosage and kills James instead. 

Love now uses the same poison on Joe. Once Love goes to slit Joe’s throat, he injects her with his own aconite. Joe explains that he realized Love was growing aconite in the garden and hoarded the antidote, which is adrenaline. Joe doses himself with adrenaline during dinner and therefore quickly regains movement. 

Love dies from the aconite. With her final words, she tells Joe they’re perfect for each other, but bad for their son. Ever in cleanup mode, Joe spins an elaborate plot to once again flee a major American city. He chops off two of his toes and bakes one of them into a pie. He then pens a tell-off suicide letter to the Madre Linda homeowners association, ostensibly from Love, and sets fire to their house. The world accepts the story of a brutal murder-suicide-arson. 

Love is celebrated by the world as a murderous folk hero — “more famous, even, than Guinevere Beck,” as Joe says. That final twist of fate is, at least, one that she would Love. 

What happened to Love and Joe’s son Henry? 

Despite her many crimes, Love truly, well, loved her son. Remember, she spent her final moments on this mortal coil reminding Joe, “[Henry] will know what you are.” It’s hard to hide homicidal tendencies from the little one growing up in your home.

Realizing that he might have to protect Henry from himself — or a life in the foster care system should Love and Joe both be revealed as murderers — Joe drops his baby off at the home of co-worker Dante (Ben Mehl) after Love’s death. Dante spent the season wanting to grow his family, and a baby like Henry would be the perfect addition. But, Joe promises to Henry as he leaves his baby on the doorstep, “This isn’t forever.” 

Watch You Season 4 to find out if Joe lives up to his promise.  

Is Love back for Season 4? 

As it turns out, yes. In the final moments of the Part 2 trailer, we see Joe approaching what appears to be his beloved basement cage. “You know what my favorite thing about love is?” he narrates as the camera pans into the cage. “It gives you second chances.” And who else could be sitting in the space but Love herself, reading a dog-eared copy of Rhys Montrose’s (Ed Speleers) A Good Man in a Cruel World. 

“Hi, Joe,” Love says with a smirk. 

Why is Love back for Season 4? 

To drop some hard truths on her husband, of course. No one has a talent for that quite like Love. By Episode 9, Joe finally knows the genuine scope of his London sins: He is the Eat the Rich Killer, Rhys is a figment of his imagination and he has been holding his former flame Marienne in a glass cage for months. Still, Joe is desperate to cling to the idea that he’s a good guy. 

Love is more than happy to set him straight — or, at least, a hallucination of her is. The “real” Love sadly hasn’t returned from the dead. Like Rhys, she’s a mental projection. 

Badgley tells Tudum that Pedretti filmed her scene in half a day, as did Elizabeth Lail who also appears in the nightmare sequence as Season 1’s You, Guinevere Beck. “Their scenes are quite potent… The fact that it was a dream and that it could be a side of each of them that we’d not seen or just more of what we want to see from them,” says Badgley, who directed the episode. “[Victoria’s] portrayal of Love is so iconic. I think it was really nice for her to come back and to revisit the cage.” 

Love and Joe argue about their marriage, and she quickly gets him to question his motives and his habit of blaming women for their own murders. Yet, Love can’t get Joe to fully examine — or own up to — the fact that his version of love is a deadly one. Only then would she give him the key to his cage, which is holding Marienne. Instead Love hands Joe a gun and holds it to his head, telling him someone needs to die in order for all of this to ever come to an end. 

Now that is love (lowercase) for the Quinn-Goldbergs.