Does Emily tell Sam her secret in Mistletoe Murders? Season 2 ends with someone else at her door

Mistletoe Murders is Hallmark's holiday mystery series, created by Ken Cuperus from his Audible original. Sarah Drew plays Emily, who runs a year-round Christmas shop in Fletcher's Grove, a small town in Upstate New York, and solves murders with skills no shopkeeper should have. Peter Mooney plays Sam, the local detective and single dad who has wanted to know who she really is since the first episode. Season 2 aired on Hallmark Channel in November 2025 and ended with "'Twas the Fight Before Christmas – Part 2." Season 3 premieres November 5, 2026.

Sam was already digging

Emily was never going to volunteer her backstory, so in season 2 Sam goes looking. A call about Emily's background makes him ask her straight out who she is. She doesn't answer. He photographs a set of coordinates in her home, Ray (David Hewlett) decodes them, and the trail leads to a name: Chimera.

Drew has never pretended Emily is an open book.

"You need to love Emily Lane, and also, she needs to lie," Drew told Lady Geeks Media.

Mooney calls her past "the bigger overarching mystery of, 'Who is Emily Lane?'" and warns that Cuperus's answer "is going to take a while to figure out," as he told TV, eh?.

What Emily tells Sam

The finale's case is a restaurant owner found dead in his own walk-in freezer. While chasing his killer, Emily finds Sam knocked out inside that same freezer, and the door locks behind her.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait, Emily talks. Her real name is Grace. She used to work in intelligence, hunting a man she believed in until he betrayed her. Grace died that day, she tells him, and Emily Lane was born.

So yes, Emily tells Sam her secret. Part of it. She starts to say there's more he should know, and Sam stops her. He thinks he already knows who she is.

What she leaves out

The flashbacks fill in what Sam doesn't hear. Grace picked the username Chimera in a boarding-school coding club. Her high school boyfriend, Aaron, later ran a hacking group under the same name, and the two of them pulled hacks together as teenagers. When Grace went through Aaron's computer, she found his ties to terrorist funding networks. In the raid that followed, she was arrested and he got away. Federal agents later offered her a deal to help track him down, believing he was rebuilding Chimera.

Emily never says Aaron's name to Sam, and never says Chimera.

Sam, meanwhile, finally does what he's been working up to and asks her on a date. They go to the gazebo, and Emily lets her guard down.

Who's at her door

The next morning, Sam texts that he's on his way with coffee and a danish. Emily opens the door expecting him. It's Aaron (Aaron Ashmore).

Sam stopped her one sentence short of the name now standing on her porch.

Drew said Emily's reaction to seeing him moves through "total shock and then fear and then rage." The episode cuts out before Aaron explains why he's come to Fletcher's Grove.

Don't miss: What is her secret in Mistletoe Murders? Three seasons of clues add up to one job Emily used to do

Where season 3 picks up

Right there. "We kick off the season with him at the door. We see that scene through," Cuperus told TV Insider.

Emily and Sam start season 3 as a couple, and Emily has already promised him no more secrets. That promise has a problem.

"Even though she has told Sam no more secrets, she has another secret that she's not allowed to tell him," Drew told TV Insider.

The new season brings more Chimera flashbacks and has Emily thinking about leaving Fletcher's Grove altogether. The premiere, "Don't Fear the Wreather," opens with Violet and June nominating Emily for town Cheerman, hoping the title will convince her to stay.

Previously we wrote: Love in Disguise webtoon already has its ending (but the drama keeps changing things)