Summer estates, curated grief: how Sirens and We Were Liars stage the performance of privilege

There are summers that pierce the world open, exposing what was meant to stay buried beneath money, manners, and salt. We Were Liars and Sirens both return to that coastline, gilded, curated, unbreathable, and ask what happens when the truth tries to surface.

“We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar.”

The myth begins with a surname. In We Were Liars, the Sinclair legacy is engraved into the island itself, a geography built on inheritance and exclusion. In Sirens, the stage is a beachfront estate where old wealth, new wealth, and service staff orbit one another in rituals of submission and denial.

“Desperation is a dangerous currency,” says creator Molly Smith Metzler, and what passes between women in that house, between Devon, Simone, and Michaela, is not trust but a kind of debt dressed in silk and forced intimacy.

What links both stories is not just location. It is the architecture of silence, the way memory is shaped by who owns the house, who writes the history, and who is told to keep it pretty. In Metzler’s words, “the wealth in this country is a cult,” and within that cult the most dangerous weapon is hospitality. The summer home is not a refuge. It is a machine.

The house is not hers

Power announces itself in the view from a balcony, in the way a room is arranged to frame certain people and erase others. In Sirens, Simone moves through the house as someone whose survival depends on maintaining its illusion. She arranges the towels, monitors the emotional climate, pours the gimlets. Her connection to Kiki goes beyond a professional role, it is financial dependence wrapped in performance. Metzler names it plainly,

“Someone has all the power, and it’s akin to buying a friend.”

The beachfront estate offers Simone shelter in exchange for obedience. She wears the right colors, says “hey hey” like the rest of them, even when her sister Devon arrives and breaks the spell. That house operates as a system of reward and punishment.

“Desperation is a dangerous currency,” Metzler says again, and in this world, Simone is deeply indebted.

We Were Liars follows the same blueprint. The Sinclair estate at Beechwood Island is inheritance codified as real estate. The girls are shaped by its walls, taught to perform the version of themselves that fits the family myth. Cadence is told what she remembers, what to forget, who is family and who is not.

“The island is ours,” she says, “Here, in some way, we are young forever.”

But it is a forever built on exclusion. Gat, the boy who arrives from outside that inheritance, sees the distortion from the start.

“We have a warped view of humanity on Beechwood. I don’t think you see that.”

In both stories, the summer home stands as a structure of control. It frames who gets to speak, who is allowed to grieve, and who must disappear to preserve the surface.

Curating memory, scripting silence

No one simply remembers. In both Sirens and We Were Liars, memory is built through repetition, through omission, and through the choreography of what may and may not be said. Cadence is told the shape of her grief before she can feel it. Her mother repeats it like a prayer,

“Silence is a protective coating over pain.”

The island in We Were Liars becomes a theater, and every summer a stage rehearsal for the same sanitized performance of family unity. But the script begins to fail when Cadence asks questions that don’t have safe answers. She starts to notice the cracks in the version she’s expected to play, and those cracks are where the truth starts to bleed through.

In Sirens, silence comes dressed in affirmation. The house is full of “hey hey” greetings, scented napkins, and polite deferrals. But beneath that is a precise script of who is allowed to remember what. Simone has learned to survive by absorbing and softening the tensions around her, but her sister arrives with questions, and with memory. Devon doesn’t accept the story as it’s been framed. She sees the house not as protection, but as erasure.

Metzler asks,

“Can you change where you come from? Can you change your stripes?”

In We Were Liars, Cadence tries. She walks through the rooms of the island trying to recover what was lost. But recovery isn’t freedom, it is confrontation. It is the choice to hold a memory even when the people around you want it buried under courtesy and control. In both stories, memory is a battleground, and the one who remembers becomes dangerous.

We Were Liars & Sirens: Rituals of affection, blueprints of control

On these summer estates, both in We Were Liars and Sirens, care follows a script. It arrives in the form of folded linens, perfectly poured drinks, matching pastel wardrobes, and careful smiles that conceal more than they express. In Sirens, these gestures are currency, and each act of service is another line in a silent agreement.

Simone spritzes Michaela’s lingerie with lavender mist not out of intimacy, but to reinforce the performance. The house thrives on these rituals, and it demands them from anyone who hopes to belong. As Metzler observed,

“The wealth in this country is a cult,” and this cult does not operate through force, it seduces through etiquette.

We Were Liars mirrors this coded tenderness. The Sinclair summers are full of curated moments, shared meals, beach walks, and rehearsed traditions meant to affirm the illusion of closeness. But the affection here is fragile. When Cadence begins to step outside the lines, her world becomes brittle. She asks,

“Do not accept an evil you can change.”

And yet, change means exile. In both narratives, affection is conditional, and care is granted to those who do not question the structure.

Both in We Were Liars and in Sirens, these rituals flatten difference. They erase struggle, pain, and history under the smooth veneer of family loyalty or feminine grace. They reward emotional restraint and punish disruption. To disrupt the ritual is to risk being removed from the frame entirely. And both Cadence and Devon learn that to exist outside the script is to stand alone.

Inheriting the story, losing the self

Every family has a myth. But in We Were Liars and Sirens, that myth is enforced with precision. It decides what counts as truth, who earns the right to tell it, and what must remain unspoken to preserve the image.

We Were Liars lets us know that, at the Beechwood Island, Cadence inherits more than property, she inherits a version of events sculpted by generations of denial.

“Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family. No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.”

This litany isn’t protection. It is erasure. And Cadence, fragile and fractured, is expected to carry the story without changing a word.

Gat sees it clearly. His presence alone disturbs the narrative, not just because of race or class, but because he speaks.

“I’m saying we should talk about it. Not everyone has private islands. Some people work on them. Some work in factories. Some don’t have work. Some don’t have food.”

His words are not just inconvenient. They are incompatible with the system. The Sinclair myth cannot absorb critique, it requires silence.

In Sirens, that same mechanism plays out through emotional labor. Simone has no access to the story unless she plays her part flawlessly. Even her presence in the house depends on being agreeable, invisible, and useful. Her value is measured by how well she maintains Kiki’s image, Devon’s peace, and Michaela’s comfort. Her memories, her history, and her voice, none of them belong in the official version. Remembering what Metzler asked...

“Can you change where you come from? Can you change your stripes?” And more importantly, will anyone let you?

These stories are not about unreliable narrators. They are about narrators who were never allowed to begin.

What the house keeps and what the body knows

When summer ends, the story of those people in We Were Liars remains. It lingers in the architecture, in the way a room feels colder without a witness, in the rituals repeated even when no one’s watching. Sirens and We Were Liars both return to spaces that insist on beauty while concealing rot, places where wealth has written its own gospel and demands that everyone else pray in silence.

Cadence’s journey through memory as depicted in We Were Liars is a refusal. She reclaims what the family tried to file away, even when it breaks her.

"We are cracked and broken,” she says, not with shame, but with recognition.

There is no safe return to who she was, and no recovery without cost. Simone’s arc, too, is a reckoning. The house may not burn, but something inside her shifts. The currency of obedience loses value, and the debt no longer defines her worth.

In both stories, We Were Liars and Sirens, the house remains standing. The summer homes do not collapse. But something else does, something deeper, something structural. The spell fades. The arrangement fails. The lie fractures. And what rises in its place is memory not as inheritance, but as rebellion.