The Wives ending explained: What happened to Annabelle?

It doesn’t take long for Beth in particular to sense something’s up, still reeling from Annabelle’s supposed death as her body was never found. Turns out, she was right – and across the course of the six episodes, she and the rest of the girls are on a mission to discover the truth.

But what exactly happened to Annabelle, and more importantly, what other skeletons were hiding in the closet?

Here’s what happened in The Wives episode 6 as the sun-soaked Channel 5 drama reached its conclusion.

What happened to Annabelle in The Wives?

As many suspected, Annabelle did not actually die last year – she’d been in hiding after local Luca (Louis Boyer), Sylvie’s summer fling, had been paid to kill her.

However, she instead paid Luca off, faked her death and went into hiding from her husband and family. Luca had threatened to kill her daughter Sky if she said a word, but she had reached out to Sky online under the pseudonym OceanMagic22.

She finally re-emerges just in time to save the Morgan wives, who have been cornered by Luca at gunpoint, demanding the return of a bag full of casino chips he had asked Natasha to look after.

When Luca looks ready to shoot, Annabelle knocks him out with a van, revealing herself to be alive to the Wives just in time, and meeting her replacement, Jade, for the first time. Bundling Luca into the back of the vehicle, the girls return to their apartments.

On route, more truths come to light when Beth confronts Annabelle about potentially sleeping with her husband and Charlie’s brother Frankie (Ben Willbond). She doesn’t deny it, and later Frankie comes clean, begging her not to leave him.

But trouble is only just beginning when they realise Luca is missing.

While Sylvie and Natasha try to track the thug down, knowing he couldn’t have got far, Sean (Jonathan Forces) goes to meet his brothers to tell them that Annabelle is alive, and Beth takes Annabelle to the police to tell them what happened.

When Charlie is told by Sean about Annabelle, he decides to flee, heading to the port with Sky and Jade to get out of Malta and away from authorities. Now aware of what his brother tried to do, Frankie tells Beth where Charlie is going, and she heads there too alongside the police.

They get there just in time, threatening to shoot him if he boards the boat. In a tense showdown, Beth manages to get through to him, and Charlie hands himself over to the police, allowing Sky to finally reunite with the mum she thought was dead.

What were the brothers up to?

Frankie, Charlie and Sean (plus Sylvie’s ex-husband, Tom, who’s not on this year’s trip) are a group as tight-knit as their wives – and all of them had secrets come to the surface throughout the course of the show.

First off, the supposed ‘grieving widow’ Charlie had actually been having an affair with Jade for more than a year, and was even with her on the night Annabelle died. He’d also been sleeping with Sylvie as well… talk about keeping it in the family.

Frankie had previously been sleeping with Annabelle behind his wife’s back – and it’s heavily implied that he is Sky’s actual father, as Charlie is infertile.

Sean and wife Natasha had been hiding from the others that they were struggling heavily with money, to the point that they’d secretly moved to the Malta apartments.

What happens next?

Fast forward to a few weeks later, and the family is in tatters. Frankie visits Charlie in prison, who is completely broken.

He then makes a last ditch attempt to reconcile with Beth, which fails, before finally meeting Luca – revealing he was actually the one who hired him to kill Annabelle all along in an attempt to hide his infidelity.

He instructs Luca to ‘finish the job he paid him to do and then leave Malta for good’.

As the group get together for a final party, as thrown by Sky, Annabelle teases Beth – who snaps and shoves her into the pool, echoing what she did to Jade at the beginning of the first episode.

The Wives is available in full on My5.

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