Diksha Sundriyal
Hulu’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ follows the story of Clare Pierce, who anonymously writes an advice column called Dear Sugar. In it, she advises people about the important things in their lives, making her come across as someone who has everything figured out. In reality, Clare is just as messed up as her readers, allowing her a unique perspective, which makes her so good at being Sugar. There are many problems in Clare’s life, but the most immediate one is her marriage.
When she gives her daughter’s college fund money to her brother without consulting with her husband, Danny, things get sour for her. Danny outs her from the house, and she is forced to live at the care home, sharing a room with a resident. For a brief while, things get better between her and Danny. But there are still a lot of things left unaddressed, especially the vibe Clare gets between Danny and their couples therapist. SPOILERS AHEAD
Did Danny Cheat on Clare With Mel, the Therapist?
After the fallout over the money, Danny and Clare decide to go for couples therapy. Clare finds Mel Green and hopes that a third-person perspective in the relationship will help clear up things between them. However, things don’t go as she’d expected. In their sessions, Clare feels the therapist is biased toward her husband. She senses a different vibe between them as if they are in a classroom and Danny is the teacher’s favorite.
Clare suspects something is going on between them when she notices that Danny has stayed back after a session to talk with Mel. While she doesn’t see them kissing, she finds it weird for her husband to speak to the therapist outside of the session. This also indicates that Danny has had a similar chat with Mel before. In one conversation, Mel says that she’s glad both of them are present at the session. This means that there have been times when Danny took a session, but Clare was not there for some reason.
Clare’s doubts flare up with the successive sessions as the therapist continues to be more empathetic with Danny, and somehow, Clare comes out as the villain in the story. Still, Mel advises them to rekindle their romance and sleep together, which works out to some extent. Soon after, Danny tells Clare that he wants to go and that he wants to be reason enough for him to leave. This is shocking for Clare because these were the exact words she used in her latest Dear Sugar column. In an ironic twist, she advised her husband to leave her.
In the final episode, Clare gets a letter from a reader named “Johnny.” He talks about the falling apart of his twenty-year marriage, not knowing whether to blame himself or his wife. He also mentions that he has met someone he clicked with and fell in love with, but he doesn’t know if it’s the right time to tell this other person that he loves her. Knowing that her husband had read her last column, Clare suspects that Johnny is actually Danny, and the woman that he loves is Mel. Does this mean that Danny and the therapist were having an affair all this while? Probably not.
Here’s what might have happened. Danny and Clare’s marriage was already on the rocks before he threw her out of the house. The money incident was his breaking point, which gave him a good enough excuse to end things with her or at least acknowledge that their relationship was not in a good place. Danny felt trapped in the marriage, and when he started talking to Mel, he found the understanding that he hadn’t been in Clare for a while now.
One of those sessions might have turned into something a little more, but chances are nothing actually happened between Danny and Mel. Yes, he has fallen in love with her and doesn’t want to be with Clare anymore, but he didn’t cheat on his wife. It is clear that Mel also feels something for him, so when he mentions his confusion over leaving Clare, she gives him a different source of advice, not knowing that Clare is Sugar. Mel cannot directly tell Danny to divorce his wife, so she leaves it to him to figure it out by himself, getting some help from Dear Sugar.
In the end, after it is clear that things have ended between Danny and Clare, we find him at Mel’s doorstep. It is clearly not office hours, and he requested her to meet him after he told her he’d broken up with Clare. From the looks of it, we can say that while they might not have indulged in an affair, Danny and Mel might get together now that his marriage is over.
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