Joey moves out of the Berglund home and into the neighboring Monaghan household, deeply upsetting Patty.

Walter and Patty leave their St. Paul neighborhood and move to Washington, DC after their children leave home.

Patty's classmate Ethan Post rapes her at a high school party during her senior year.

Patty meets Walter Berglund and his friend Richard Katz when Eliza takes her to one of Richard's shows.

Patty and Walter marry three weeks after her college graduation, with Patty privately framing Walter as her path to winning.

Walter offers Richard free use of the Berglund family lake house in exchange for completing renovation work there.

Patty goes to Richard late at night at the lake house while Walter is away and they have sex.

Walter takes a position working for the Cerulean Mountain Trust alongside his devoted assistant Lalitha.

Joey secretly marries his longtime girlfriend Connie at a courthouse without telling his family or friends.

Joey delivers a shipment of rusted, antiquated Pladsky truck parts to be used by American soldiers in Iraq.

Richard places Patty's written autobiography on Walter's desk, ensuring Walter will discover the details of Patty's affair.

Walter reads Patty's autobiography, confronts her about her affair with Richard, and forces her to leave their home.

Walter abandons his prepared speech at the LBI grand opening and delivers an angry anti-corporate outburst that sparks a riot.

Walter receives a phone call informing him that Lalitha has died in a sudden car accident.

Patty appears shivering on Walter's doorstep after months apart, and Walter eventually takes her inside and kisses her.

Freedom follows the Berglund family through decades of domestic turbulence, beginning with the early strain of Joey's departure from the family home. Patty's troubled past — including a rape that her parents failed to take seriously — shapes her choices as an adult, including her marriage to the devoted Walter Berglund. A long-smoldering attraction to Walter's friend Richard Katz culminates in a lake house affair that plants the seed of the marriage's eventual destruction. Meanwhile, Joey's war profiteering venture in Iraq adds political danger to the family's personal crises, before Richard's delivery of Patty's confessional memoir finally breaks the marriage open. Walter's explosive speech at a corporate grand opening turns him into an unlikely activist celebrity, but the sudden death of his assistant Lalitha robs him of any joy in that success. After years of separation, Patty and Walter reconcile at their Minnesota lake house, eventually converting the property into a bird sanctuary as a lasting tribute to Lalitha.

The Berglund family's defining moments from courtship to collapse and reconciliation.

Patty slashes the tires of her neighbor Blake's truck after his noisy construction project pushes her past her limit.

Patty's father Ray drives her home after the rape and urges her to move on and be more careful in the future.

Patty confronts her college friend Eliza about faking leukemia and ends their years-long obsessive friendship.

Patty slips on ice while running joyfully through the street after ending her friendship with Eliza, badly injuring her knee.

Patty travels to New York with Richard, sleeping in separate spaces, and returns home shaken and confused about her feelings.

Walter's father Gene dies just three days after Walter and Patty's wedding.

Patty drinks heavily at Jessica's college Parents' Weekend and humiliates Jessica by oversharing stories about Eliza.

Richard enters a rehabilitation facility after driving under the influence of alcohol during an expensive and chaotic band tour.

Joey befriends his college roommate Jonathan and is introduced to Jonathan's strikingly beautiful sister Jenna.

Walter and Lalitha finalize a deal permitting mountaintop removal of 14,000 acres in West Virginia for the Trust.

American troops in Fallujah are successfully ambushed after their trucks break down at a critical moment in battle.

Walter visits his estranged brother Mitch at a campground and leaves feeling an unexpected sense of peace and gratitude.

After Walter evicts her, Patty moves in with Richard in Jersey City and lives with him for three months before leaving.

Patty's father Ray dies of cancer after Patty spends his final days at his bedside in partial reconciliation.

Walter captures his neighbor Linda's predatory cat Bobby and drives it to an animal shelter three hours away.

Behind the Berglunds' headline crises lie a series of quieter but equally damaging moments that reveal the depth of each character's wounds. Patty's capacity for vengeance appears early through the tire-slashing incident, while her fractured relationship with her father Ray — shaped by his cold response to her rape — haunts her for decades until his death. Her intense, codependent college friendship with Eliza mirrors the self-destructive patterns that recur throughout her adult life. Joey's path toward war profiteering is paved by his introduction to Jonathan's influential family circle and his growing infatuation with Jenna, setting him on a course of moral compromise. Walter's Cerulean Mountain Trust project leads him and Lalitha deeper into ethical grey areas as they finalize deals that displace families and enable destructive mining across West Virginia. The consequences of Joey's bad deal reach catastrophic scale when American troops are ambushed in Fallujah, while Walter's final redemption takes the small but meaningful form of protecting the birds of his Minnesota neighborhood.

The supporting moments that deepen each character's journey across the full story.

Walter leaves his corporate job at 3M to take a lower-paying position with the Nature Conservancy.

Patty's basketball coach notices her poor play after the rape and asks what is wrong, causing the assault to become known.

Patty realizes she is partly using Walter to stay close to Richard, and the awareness fills her with guilt.

Patty decides to marry Walter, privately framing her choice as a competitive victory over her high-achieving mother and sisters.

Richard's album Nameless Lake earns him mainstream fame and a Grammy nomination, which he privately experiences as humiliating.

Joey argues with Walter about the Iraq War at a Fourth of July family dinner, and Walter effectively disowns him.

Joey nervously puts his wedding ring in his mouth during a tense phone call with Connie and accidentally swallows it.

Connie reveals cuts on her forearm — one for each night Joey did not call — and hands him her trust fund money.

Walter kisses Lalitha while they are alone in a car in West Virginia but stops himself, admitting he thinks he loves her.

Richard reads Patty's autobiography and feels a stab of jealousy upon realizing that Walter, not Richard, is the hero of her story.

Joey searches through his excrement in Argentina and retrieves his swallowed wedding ring, feeling transformed and newly committed to Connie.

Walter learns Patty has gone to live with Richard, flushes his wedding ring down the toilet, and destroys every photo of Patty.

Walter's viral riot footage draws a wave of activist support, and Joey donates $100,000 to Walter's Free Space initiative.

Patty watches footage of Walter's angry speech and wonders for the first time whether she had been holding him back.

Walter and Patty donate their lake house to conservation, and workers convert the property into a bird sanctuary named Lalitha.

Freedom's most consequential moments are often quiet decisions or private revelations that permanently alter the story's trajectory. Patty's realization that she is partly using Walter to stay close to Richard explains much of the guilt that eventually drives her to write her confessional autobiography, and her choice to frame her marriage as a competitive victory reveals how little she initially understood herself. Joey's arc is defined by a series of moral awakenings — from swallowing his wedding ring out of shame to retrieving it from his own excrement as a raw act of commitment — that gradually transform him into a more honest person. Walter's growing love for Lalitha reaches a critical turning point on a West Virginia roadway, shortly before her death forces him into years of isolated grief. Richard's reading of Patty's manuscript — and his jealous discovery that Walter, not he, is the true hero of her story — leads him to expose the affair, granting Walter a brutal but necessary freedom from illusion. The pool closes with the transformation of the lake house into a bird sanctuary, a symbol of the fragile but hard-won peace the Berglunds finally build from the wreckage of their marriage.

The pivotal revelations and emotional turning points that reshape every character.