It starts in a bathroom lit only by the violet glow of a Nashville bar sign bleeding through cheap blinds. Sofia Carson stands alone, barefoot on cracked tile, staring at a white plastic stick that has just rewritten her entire life. Two pink lines. The camera holds on her face for eight merciless seconds while every ounce of color drains from it. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry. She just whispers a single, broken word that somehow feels louder than any explosion in the first movie: “Fuck.”

That moment, thirty-eight minutes into Purple Hearts 2, is the precise second the fandom fractured forever.

Because the child growing inside Cassie Salazar might not belong to the man who went to war for her, who learned to walk again for her, who married her twice (once for papers, once for love). The child might belong to Roman Knight, the slick, tattooed music producer played by Jacob Elordi with the kind of dangerous beauty that makes good decisions feel boring. And the internet has been at war ever since.

The betrayal isn’t cartoonish. That’s what makes it hurt so badly. It isn’t some mustache-twirling villain seducing the heroine while the hero is conveniently missing. It’s worse. It’s human.

Luke had been gone for seventy-three days, locked away in a VA residential program in the California desert after a night terror so violent he almost put his fist through Cassie’s face while still asleep. He begged her to let him go get help. She begged him not to leave. He left anyway, because staying was starting to feel like another kind of combat. Cassie, meanwhile, was on her first headlining tour, twenty-three cities in thirty days, drowning in the sudden weight of fame she had spent her whole life chasing. Roman was there every night after the encore, leaning against the soundboard with a bottle of Don Julio and a smile that said, I see how tired you are. Let me carry it for a minute.

One minute became six shots. Six shots became the backseat of a black Escalade. The screen cuts to black the moment his hand disappears under the hem of her dress, and the mercy of that cut is the only kindness the movie ever shows us.

Three months later Luke comes home early, carrying roses and a velvet box with a ring he picked out with his combat pay. He finds the pregnancy test in the trash before he even sets the flowers down. Nicholas Galitzine doesn’t raise his voice once in the fight that follows. He goes quiet the way only men who have learned to kill with their hands can go quiet. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks like thin ice.

“Were you going to tell me at all… or were you waiting to find out whose it was first?”

Cassie can’t answer. Because the truth is she still doesn’t know.

That silence is the wound the rest of the film spends two hours trying, and sometimes failing, to cauterize.

What follows is not a tidy love-triangle soap opera. It is a slow, excruciating autopsy of two people who love each other so much they almost destroy each other trying to protect what they have. Cassie schedules the non-invasive prenatal paternity test and then cancels it three times. Luke sleeps on the couch for six weeks, waking up every morning to make her ginger tea because the smell of coffee makes her vomit. They go to couple’s therapy where the counselor asks them to finish the sentence “I’m afraid that…” and they both say, at the exact same time, “you’ll never look at me the same.”

Roman, to his credit or damnation, doesn’t disappear. He shows up at their door with purple roses and an offer to co-parent “no matter what the results say,” because he genuinely believes the night they spent together meant something. Jacob Elordi plays him not as a villain but as the road Cassie almost took, the version of her life where she chooses the easy chemistry and the glittering career over the man who still flinches at fireworks. It’s terrifying how tempting he makes that road look.

The paternity test scene is twenty-two minutes of pure agony. They sit in the obstetrician’s office holding hands like strangers waiting for a jury verdict. When the envelope finally comes, Luke’s fingers shake so badly he can’t open it. Cassie does it for him. She reads the results first. Her face crumples, not with relief, but with something more complicated. She hands him the paper.

He reads it.

He looks up at her.

And smiles.

“It’s mine,” he says, voice raw. “It’s ours.”

She sobs so hard she nearly falls off the exam table. He catches her the way he caught her the night the IED took his leg, the way he caught her when the world tried to tell them their love was a fraud. The camera pulls back through the window as they hold each other in that sterile little room, two broken people who somehow, against every odd, chose each other anyway.

Later, much later, when Cassie is eight months pregnant and waddling around their new house in Austin, Luke finds the second test she never told him about, the one she took the week before the official one, the one that said the baby might not be his. He doesn’t get angry. He just sits on the floor of their bedroom and cries for the first time since he came home from war. Cassie finds him there at 3 a.m. and lies down beside him, belly between them like a peace offering.

“I needed to know you’d stay even if it wasn’t yours,” she whispers.

He kisses her forehead, her cheeks, the stretch marks on her stomach that look like lightning bolts in the moonlight.

“I needed to know you’d let me,” he answers.

Their daughter is born on a Tuesday in April, screaming like she’s already got opinions about the world. They name her Hope Valentina Morrow, because hope is the only thing harder than war, and Valentina because Cassie’s grandmother never got to see her sing on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Luke cuts the cord with the same hands that once held an M4 in Fallujah. Cassie sings “Come Back Home” through the pain, off-key and perfect.

The final shot of the movie lingers on the three of them in the hospital bed at dawn, purple light spilling across their faces like forgiveness. Luke is asleep with his cheek against Cassie’s hair, one protective hand curled over the baby’s tiny chest. Cassie is staring at them both like she’s trying to memorize the moment before life has a chance to ruin it again.

The screen fades to black on her whispered voice, barely audible over the heart monitor:

“We made it. God help us, we actually made it.”

And somewhere, in living rooms across the world, millions of viewers realize they’ve been holding their breath for two hours straight.

Love isn’t the fairy tale. Love is the morning after the mistake, when you wake up and choose the harder thing anyway.

Purple Hearts 2 doesn’t give us the easy version. It gives us the real one.

And somehow, against all reason, it’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.