From day one, The Young and the Restless’ Audra has been a lot. A lot of hunger. A lot of ambition. A lot of relentlessness. And it times she’s rubbed viewers the wrong way, with her ceaseless scheming and complaints that her scheming has gotten her in trouble. But the show altogether flipped the script on how we see Audra with the February 3 episode

In pivotal scenes with Holden, Audra explained why she is the way she is — and why it’s so easy for rich princesses like Claire to get under her skin. While Audra was growing up, her parents worked two jobs to keep food on the table. She could never keep up with the mean girls who suffered from chronic cases of affluenza. They made Audra’s life hell.

“I was just so desperate to fit in,” she explained. That’s when she’d started stealing, in the faint hopes that she could win the rich kids’ acceptance. (Spoiler alert: She didn’t.) It was a terrible time for Audra, but she could see the benefit of it. “That’s when I got tough.”

And although we may always have thought that Audra was completely self-serving and mercenary, it isn’t the case. Once she started earning a good living herself, she went back to the stores from which she’d stolen and bought a bunch of clothes that she donated to organizations that help women. It was, she said, her way of trying to right past wrongs.