In a move that still has us rattled, on The Young and the Restless episode airing on September 26, Sharon (Sharon Case) kills Heather (Vail Bloom). Or at least that's what it looks like at first glance.
Viewers will recall that in the previous episode, Sharon broke into Daniel’s (Michael Graziadei) penthouse to poison Daniel’s whiskey, but later had a change of heart, and wrestled with an imaginary Cameron Kirsten (Linden Ashby) over the contaminated bottle before knocking over some glasses. (Yes, we too are still confused how she physically struggled with a figment of her imagination.) After Sharon cleaned up all the glass she saw she attempted to escape, but on her way out ran into Heather.
As the episode from September 26 kicks off, Heather confronts Sharon for being in her home. Sharon starts telling a series of lies that don’t make any sense. First, she tells Heather that Daniel just stepped out but asked her to wait for him to return. Heather calls the Cassidy First owner out on that lie, noting she knows Daniel went to dinner with Phyllis (Michelle Stafford) and Summer (Allison Lanier) before he went to pick up Lucy (Lily Brooks O’Briant).
Sharon changes her story claiming she has some things she wants to further discuss with Daniel, so she called him and he had the doorman let her into the apartment to wait. Heather again accuses Sharon of lying, as she knows Daniel wouldn’t have just left Sharon in their apartment as unhinged as she has been lately.
That’s when Sharon breaks down talking about Cassie (Camryn Grimes), and says she just wants Daniel, Heather and Lucy to leave town so she doesn’t have to constantly be reminded about what happened. While Heather is sympathetic, she’s obviously tired of Sharon using Cassie as an excuse to harass her family, and brings up the point that while Daniel made his fair share of mistakes the night of the accident, it was Cassie who was driving when the car.
The ladies continue to go back and forth when Heather suddenly spots some glass Sharon missed in her clean-up job. When Heather asks her about it, Sharon pretends not to know where the glass came from. It becomes clear that Sharon isn’t going to tell the truth about why she’s in the apartment and how she got in, so Heather grabs her phone to call the police, only for Sharon to smack the device out of her hand.
Things go off the rails from here. Heather knows something is wrong with Sharon, and when the attorney mentions calling the police again or Nick (Joshua Morrow), Sharon loses it. Sharon attempts to leave when Heather turns her back to grab her phone. Noticing Sharon trying to leave, Heather runs towards the front door and grabs Sharon’s arm. Sharon throws Heather to the ground and then asks if she’s okay. Heather is nonresponsive initially before sitting up to say, "You are out of your mind." At this point, Sharon goes into a trance and loses focus.
Viewers next see Sharon waking up from a nap to spot Heather on the floor. Sharon is dazed and confused about what’s going on, and Cameron pops back up suggesting that Heather is dead. Sharon rushes to Heather and lifts up her head to find blood and glass. A hysterical Sharon is horrified by what she thinks she’s done. Cameron tells her she doesn’t have time to sit in her emotions as she has to clean up this mess before Daniel and Lucy get home.
Sharon goes to work, wrapping Heather’s body in a sheet, wiping up the blood and grabbing Heather’s phone and the whiskey bottle. A few moments later, Sharon is seen throwing the sheet, presumably with Heather’s body in it, off of a bridge into some water.
With all that being said, we have to ask, is Heather really dead? For starters, Sharon pretty much blacked out when events unfolded. One moment Heather was on the floor talking and the next she was dead. So if Heather is truly dead, we don’t know how she became that way. All viewers know is she had glass near her head and neck, and there was blood on the floor. This is good reason to give us pause.
Now yes, Sharon checked for a pulse on Heather and didn’t find one. However, in the soap world, characters miss faint pulses all of the time. Look at Finn (Tanner Novlan) on The Bold and the Beautiful. Is it possible that once Sharon threw Heather’s nearly lifeless body into the water Heather got a jolt of energy from the conditions and somehow survived? Will Heather reappear? Certainly, these are possibilities.
Plus, who’s to say that Heather’s body was actually on the floor? Sharon has a warped sense of reality these days. Again she imagines that Cameron is real and has blackouts where she can’t recall where she has been and what she’s been doing. There’s a chance that this whole confrontation with Heather just played out in Sharon’s mind.
However, this explanation may be less plausible than the previously mentioned one when you consider Christine (Lauralee Bell) is headed back to town according to the actress’ Instagram post.
It’s not hard to imagine Christine returning to Genoa City just in time to step back into her district attorney shoes and work with Chance (Conner Floyd), who just returned to the police department, to investigate what happened to Heather. After all, Heather was Christine’s stepdaughter for years, and Daniel is her godson, so Christine would be heavily invested. If we factor in this angle, then we arrive back at our theory that Heather was attacked by Sharon but didn’t really die.
All in all, we just can’t picture Heather being dead. That would box Sharon into a horrible corner. Once the truth is discovered, her pathways would likely be prison or Fairview (the mental health facility) for the rest of her life, and neither location is a permanent set on The Young and the Restless.
Considering we haven’t caught word that Sharon Case plans to leave the soap, we have to assume she’s not going to face a murder conviction. Although, how fun would it be to see her locked up with Patty Williams (Stacy Haiduk), who wouldn’t be thrilled with Sharon knowing she killed her niece Heather?
New episodes of The Young and the Restless air weekdays on CBS. Episodes become available to stream on Paramount Plus the next day.
