Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Four years after graduation, the friends return to Tree Hill as young adults with plans that have not gone smoothly. Lucas has published a novel but is stuck on his next book, and he comes home with his editor and girlfriend, Lindsey. Peyton leaves a music-label job and returns too, reopening the feelings she and Lucas left unresolved. Brooke has built Clothes Over Bro’s into a fashion business, while Nathan is in a wheelchair after a fight damaged his spine. He and Haley are raising their four-year-old son, Jamie, and Haley teaches at Tree Hill High.
Lucas coaches the Ravens and clashes with gifted, difficult player Quentin, while Haley tries to reach him as a student. Nathan works through rehabilitation and his frustration over lost basketball plans. The couple hires nanny Carrie, whose closeness with Jamie hides her attraction to Nathan and a growing fixation on the family. At home, Haley and Nathan struggle to repair their marriage; Carrie manipulates the tension, then kidnaps Jamie after Lucas and Lindsey’s wedding falls apart. Lindsey leaves the altar after recognizing Peyton as the woman behind Lucas’s book, and Dan finds Jamie and brings him home.
Brooke also takes in Angie, a baby who needs medical care, then says goodbye when the baby's medical treatment is finished. Lucas’s feelings remain unsettled after losing Lindsey, and his drinking begins affecting his work with the Ravens. By the finale Nathan is shooting baskets again, but Dan is struck by a car outside the hospital. At the airport Lucas phones an unidentified woman and asks her to fly with him to Las Vegas to marry him. The episode ends before the call reveals whom he chose.