Piper’s position at the very end of Orange Is the New Black was predetermined. Taystee’s represented a choice on the part of the writers. No show of the current era has so sharply used juxtaposition to depict inequality in America. From its earliest episodes, Orange has used the art of contiguity—placing certain scenes next to each other—to make explicit points. In the series finale, “Here’s Where We Get Off,” Kohan (who wrote the episode) follows a scene of Piper’s father (Bill Hoag) discussing his attempts to “Marie Kondo” his possessions with a sequence of a homeless camp being razed. As its inhabitants race to collect their most precious possessions, one man looks back wistfully at an abandoned couch, as if he’s thanking it for its service and letting it go. By pairing these two scenes, Kohan offers some withering insight into the privilege of clutter.

Taystee, similarly, has always stood next to Piper to illustrate what a white, blond, Smith-educated woman with “TV titties” can’t. And Taystee’s fate over the final two seasons of the show has essentially represented Orange’s worldview. At the end of Season 4, after Poussey was killed when a guard suffocated her, a grieving Taystee incited a prison riot after realizing that the system would never bring her friend justice. Poussey’s death, and the events that followed, cemented a shift in tone for the series, and a turn away from zanier plot developments (R.I.P. Piper’s panty business) toward pivotal questions of institutionalized racism and powerlessness. At the heart of them all was Taystee, who tried to negotiate an end to the riot, but was thwarted when Maria (Jessica Pimentel) decided to release hostages to try to shave time off her own sentence. After armed responders forcibly entered the prison, they accidentally shot the sadistic captain of the guards, Desi Piscatella (Brad William Henke), and covered up his death, implicating Taystee. At the end of Season 6, she was convicted of murder.

Everything Taystee had previously told Piper was shown to be true. The jury in the courtroom didn’t see her—her sense of humor, her intelligence, her potential, her empathy. They saw, instead, a black woman in prison for dealing drugs, which was all they needed to see to believe she could also be a murderer. In dealing Taystee such a brutal hand, the writers on Orange gave the series its darkest story line since the death of Poussey. And they set up a conundrum for the show’s final season. If they gave Taystee a happy ending and got her conviction thrown out, the series would sacrifice its commitment to accurately portraying the state of the justice system for so many of the unfairly incarcerated. But if they left her in despair, they’d be doing a disservice to a character who represented the show’s heart.

In Season 7, Taystee’s story line got even darker. She tried to hang herself from a prison bunk, in a crushingly bleak scene, and when that failed, she asked Daya (Dascha Polanco) for drugs to help her end her own life. She wrote a letter to Cindy’s (Adrienne C. Moore) daughter revealing her parentage, which indirectly led to Cindy’s homelessness. And yet, as the season continued, Taystee kept finding fragments of things to cling to. Her friendship with Tamika (Susan Heyward), now Litchfield’s warden, was one. Her realization that she could help other inmates get their GEDs by tutoring them was another. She came up with an idea for helping recently paroled women succeed on the outside by teaching them financial literacy and giving them microloans, via a fund named after Poussey. After she learned that her lawyer didn’t think there was sufficient new evidence to open an appeal in her case, and Taystee realized all over again that she would likely be in prison for the rest of her life, she also found out that several inmates had passed their GED test. “You made this happen,” Tamika told her in a note. “Tomorrow will be better.”