The ending of The Last Sunrise answers the two questions that drive Anna Todd’s novel: what happens to Oriah “Ry” Pera’s health, and whether her love story with Julián can survive beyond the summer they share in Mallorca. The answer to both is hopeful. Ry lives. And the relationship endures. The Prime Video adaptation, starring Maia Reficco as Ry and Fernando Líndez as Julián, premieres August 26, 2026. As with any adaptation, there’s always the possibility that scenes will change or conflicts will be condensed. But in the source material, the fate of the protagonists is unambiguous. The Last Sunrise isn’t a farewell. It’s a beginning.
The Last Sunrise begins with Oriah trying to live with an illness that completely conditions her life. He suffers from tuberous sclerosis, and his epileptic seizures can be avoided with medication, although there is another much more drastic solution: a brain operation that could cure her in exchange for making her lose her memories. Oriah refuses to take that risk and travels with her mother, Isolde, to Mallorca, where she meets Julian. What begins as a chance encounter quickly turns into a love story that makes Oriah begin to rethink the way she wants to live.
The Last Sunrise Ending Explained: Why Does Oriah Stop Taking the Medication?
Medications control seizures, but Oriah feels they also keep her emotionally anesthetized. After meeting Julian and beginning to enjoy a life that until then I had barely experienced, he decides to stop taking the pills. The decision has consequences. After arguing with his mother, he suffers a new crisis and falls into the hotel pool. They manage to save her, but the doctors recommend the operation again. Oriah continues to refuse because, for her, surviving by losing all her memories would also mean losing a fundamental part of herself.
Ry’s Condition
Ry arrives on the island carrying a genetic disease that has shaped much of her life: tuberous sclerosis. The condition has caused complications over the years, but the most pressing concern is the presence of brain lesions and the possibility of a high-risk surgical procedure. She’s been avoiding the operation, not because she doesn’t understand the risks of refusing, but because she’s afraid of what the surgery might take from her.
The fear is specific. She doesn’t want to lose her memories. She doesn’t want her entire identity reduced to a series of medical decisions made by other people. There’s a version of her life where the disease becomes the only thing that defines her—where every choice, every relationship, every moment is filtered through the lens of her diagnosis. She’s been fighting against that version of herself for years.
Meeting Julián changes something. It allows her to imagine a different kind of future, one where she’s more than just a patient. But the health crisis doesn’t disappear just because she’s fallen in love. The novel is careful about this. Romance doesn’t cure illness. It just makes the stakes of survival more meaningful.
The Crisis
Toward the end of the story, Ry suffers a severe medical emergency. The situation is dire enough that the surgery she’d been avoiding becomes inevitable. There’s no more time for debate. No more room for hesitation. The operation happens in urgent circumstances, with all the fear and uncertainty that implies.
The novel doesn’t soften this moment. Ry’s terror is real. The possibility that she’ll wake up without her memories—without the experiences that made her who she is—is treated with the weight it deserves. The surgery isn’t a dramatic plot device. It’s a genuine existential threat to the person she’s become.
What Happens to Ry
The operation succeeds. Ry wakes up with her memories intact, the fear that had haunted her throughout the novel unrealized. It’s not a miracle cure—she’ll still need ongoing care, medication, and regular check-ups. But the most terrifying outcome, the one she’d been running from, doesn’t come to pass.
The novel’s decision to let her survive matters. It would have been easy to use her illness as a tragic ending, to kill her off for maximum emotional impact. Instead, the story allows her to live. That’s more radical than it sounds. Romance novels often treat chronic illness as a death sentence, a way of extracting tragedy from a character’s suffering. The Last Sunrise refuses that path. Ry’s illness is part of her story, but it doesn’t define the ending.
How the Love Story Resolves
The epilogue jumps forward about a year. Ry and Julián are still together. The relationship has survived the transition from holiday romance to something more substantial. They’ve found a way to make it work—Ry maintaining her medical care while Julián remains connected to Mallorca.
The novel also resolves other threads. Family tensions that had been simmering throughout the story find some closure. The dispute around the island’s territory—a subplot that gives the setting more weight—resolves. And Ry returns to dancing, reconnecting with a version of her life that isn’t entirely consumed by her diagnosis.
The illness is still there. It always will be. But it no longer defines her completely. She’s found a way to live with it rather than despite it.
What Does the Final Meeting with Julian Mean?
Oriah decides to stay in Mallorca and ends up returning to the same beach where she met Julian. When they both meet again, she doesn’t remember who he is. Julian introduces himself again, and Oriah smiles, as if there is still a certain familiarity that her conscious memory cannot identify. The film thus closes its story by showing that both start from scratch. Julian doesn’t try to force her to immediately remember what they had. Now he will have to meet her again and, perhaps, make her fall in love with him again.
What the Ending Means
The title of the story—The Last Sunrise—sounds like it should signal an ending. A farewell. A final moment before the darkness closes in. But the novel inverts that expectation. The last sunrise isn’t the end of anything. It’s the beginning of a new chapter.
Ry and Julián don’t get a fairy tale ending. They get something harder and more honest: a future that requires work, compromise, and ongoing medical management. They choose each other anyway. That choice is the point.
The ending suggests that love doesn’t cure illness, and illness doesn’t have to destroy love. Two things can be true at once. Ry can be sick and happy. She can need surgery and still dance. She can face an uncertain future and still commit to the person she wants beside her.
For a genre that often relies on tragedy to generate meaning, that’s a quietly radical conclusion. The last sunrise doesn’t mean the sun is going down. It means the day is just beginning. Ry and Julián decide to keep watching it rise together. That’s the ending. That’s the whole point.