Amy Fleming was just 15 when Heartland started, and she already had a boyfriend. Back then, it was Jesse Stanton—until a wild party, a drunk mistake, and a punch from a brand-new ranch hand named Ty Borden changed everything.
That was 2007. Nearly two decades later, fans are still arguing about Amy’s heart. Ask a Heartland group who was her best match and the comments fill up fast. Some say Ty was her soulmate and that’s the end of it. Others love the woman Amy has become with Nathan Pryce Jr. and want him to stay for good.
The short answer: Amy’s big love stories on Heartland are Ty Borden, her husband and Lyndy’s father, and now Nathan Pryce Jr. Along the way there was a teenage romance with Caleb Odell, a costly flirtation with Chase Powers, an unwanted declaration from a prince, and a gentle, heartbreaking start with Finn Cotter.
Here is how each one actually played out on the ranch.
Ty Borden: The Boy in the Loft
They didn’t start well. Amy told Ty off the first time she saw him, for driving too close to the horses. He was a troubled 17-year-old working off his probation at the ranch, and she was grieving her mother.
It still took a whole season for them to kiss. That happened in the Season 1 finale, “Coming Together,” in February 2008. Then Ty left for Calgary to find his father without saying goodbye. He left Amy a note.
That set the pattern for years. They were close, then apart, then close again. At the end of Season 2, alone at the fishing cabin, Amy finally told him she had always loved him. In Season 3 their truck broke down on the way to the school dance, so they danced in the back of it instead, and Ty gave her a promise ring.
Even the proposal didn’t go smoothly. Ty carried a ring around for months. When he finally asked in the loft, Amy said it wasn’t special enough and walked away laughing. He got it right in Season 6, after a walk along a river while the two of them were setting up a friend’s fishing camp, and after the two of them had spent the day saving a wild foal from a snare. She said yes.
They married at Heartland in the Season 8 finale, “Written in Stone,” in March 2015. Amy rode to her wedding on Spartan with Jack beside her on Paint. Off screen, Amber Marshall had married Shawn Turner on their own farm two years earlier, with showrunner Heather Conkie at the wedding “taking notes,” as Marshall later told TV Insider. You can read more about Amber’s real ranch wedding here.
On their first anniversary, at the end of Season 9, Amy told Ty he was going to be a father. Lyndy was born in the Season 10 finale, on the day of Caleb’s wedding.
For a lot of viewers, this is the whole show. Marshall has said as much. “Fans who have been long-time viewers of the show know how strong that connection was and how important the relationship was for the Heartland series,” she told TV Insider. Our look back at classic Amy and Ty moments has more.
Caleb Odell: the cowboy who never quite left
Caleb arrived in Season 2 as a cocky rodeo cowboy and the new ranch hand, hired while Ty was away. He asked Amy out on her birthday, partly as a cover to get her home for her surprise party. Later he used Amy to needle Ty every chance he got.
For a while it was a real love triangle. Amy and Caleb did date. It ended after Caleb let Ashley Stanton stay at his trailer and lied to Amy about it. Before long Caleb and Ty were best friends, and Caleb married Ashley.
Caleb has stayed in Amy’s life ever since. He became Lyndy’s godfather, and in Season 18 he admitted the feelings he’d once had for her before telling her he had found someone new. Kerry James, who plays him, has been honest about it. “Amy was the girl of his dreams since day one,” he told TV Insider in 2025, “and I think that he has had to accept over time that being close to her as a friend is probably as close as things are ever going to get.”
He didn’t pick a side either. “I think ultimately what Caleb would want most is for Amy to be happy,” he said.
Chase Powers: the one who cost her Ty, for a while
Chase, played by Torrance Coombs, showed up at the Ring of Fire colt-starting contest at the end of Season 3. He was arrogant, but he was also good with horses, and he paid Amy a lot of attention.
It mattered. Amy broke up with Ty and handed back his promise ring in the Season 3 finale. Early in Season 4, after a horse show together, she and Chase kissed. She told Ty about the kiss but not about her feelings. When she finally admitted, in the Season 4 finale, that her feelings for Chase were the real reason they’d split, it was one of the hardest stretches the couple ever went through.
Chase came back once more, in Season 6, married. He kissed Amy again. This time she slapped him.
The prince who said he loved her
Engaged to Ty, Amy left at the end of Season 7 to tour Europe as a trainer for Ahmed, an Arabian prince with a racing team. On her last night there he gave her a necklace and they kissed. She didn’t tell Ty.
Ahmed then turned up in Hudson in Season 8, told Amy he loved her and offered to buy her a house. She told him she loved Ty. The kiss still came out at a family dinner, and it took most of a season for Amy and Ty to find their way back. They did, and they got married at the end of it.
Losing Ty
About two years before fans found out, Graham Wardle called Marshall to say he was leaving the show. He told her before he told the producers.
“And I was hurt,” she told the Calgary Herald. “When he first told me, it stung a little bit. But then, as I had time to process it, I understood it.” The Herald called Amy and Ty “arguably” the true heart of Heartland, and that’s why a quick divorce or another long trip away “just wasn’t going to cut it” as a way to write him out.
Ty died in the first minutes of the Season 14 premiere on January 10, 2021, from complications of the gunshot wound he took at the end of Season 13. The story jumped ahead a year. “It’s been a year of numbness,” Marshall said of where Amy was. “It’s been a year of her crying until she can’t cry anymore.” We’ve covered why Graham Wardle left Heartland separately.
The show gave Amy a long time with that grief, and it cost Marshall something too. “For myself, playing a grieving widow was hard on me,” she said. “Every day you’re coming in upset and trying to get into very dark places.” In Season 15 Amy put Ty’s name on the equine youth centre she helped fund: the Dr. Ty Borden Equestrian Youth Center.
It wasn’t until Season 16, Marshall said, that the writers decided “Amy is allowed to move forward. She is allowed to be happy.” There’s more on those years in our piece on Amber Marshall, loss, and Amy finding love again.
Finn Cotter: the start that never got to finish
Finn came to Heartland late in Season 15, a farrier from Saskatchewan helping his grandfather Al with a half-blind Clydesdale. The new horseshoes he made for Spartan eased the old horse’s arthritis. Amy liked him, and for the first time since Ty, fans could see it.
The cast and writers had big plans. “We spent multiple days having all kinds of different story arc talks,” Marshall said. “We thought, ‘Okay, this is going to take us through the rest of the season and beyond.'”
Robert Cormier, who played Finn, died on September 23, 2022, at 33, from injuries he suffered in a fall. In his last on-screen episode, Season 16’s “Vigil,” Finn tells Amy he has to go back to Kindersley to help the father of a friend who died. They share a brief kiss, and Amy pulls back and tells him to go. After that, the show let Finn go quietly.
“When we found out the news, it was devastating,” Marshall said. “It was one of those moments that served as a reminder that you never know when you’re going to lose someone around you.”
Nathan Pryce Jr.: the neighbour nobody saw coming
On paper, Nathan should never have worked. He came back to Hudson in Season 17 to run his father’s ranch, the Pryces were Heartland’s rivals in the beef business, and Jack and Tim didn’t trust him. Amy was kind to him anyway.
That’s the part Spencer Lord liked best. He told Pop-Culturalist that the relationship “isn’t just a simple ‘I like you, you like me, let’s be best buds,'” and called it “a friendship that grows through adversity.”
It grew slowly. Nathan was closed off, and Amy learned his first marriage had ended partly because of it. They team roped together at the Hudson rodeo with Caleb watching from the side. She stood by him while his father’s Alzheimer’s got worse. In the final scene of Season 18, they told each other they were in love.
Then the hard parts came. Lyndy saw them kissing and didn’t want Nathan around, so he had to win her over. On a trip with Caleb and Ashley, Amy admitted she’d been distant because the place reminded her of Ty. She even hurt her hand practising team roping with him. At the end of Season 19 he sold his ranch to buy out his sister Gracie, took a job running a horse rescue on Salt Spring Island and asked Amy to marry him.
“I think that she is shell-shocked, because she never really saw herself getting married again,” Marshall told TV Week. “If it had just been Amy on her own, without her past, without a child, I feel she would have jumped at the opportunity and said, ‘Yes, let’s go.'”
Amy’s answer so far is “I’m not saying no.” Nathan is working the cow horse circuit far from Hudson, he still reads Lyndy a chapter of a book over the phone every night, and he has promised to ask again properly, ring and all. Our look at Amy’s answer to Nathan covers how that proposal played out.
Marshall wants the story to take its time. “We’re giving it the time and the weight that it needs for such an impacting idea, both for Amy and for Heartland,” she said.
Team Ty, Team Nathan, and why both have a point
Fans who say Ty was the one aren’t wrong. He and Amy grew up together on screen, across 13 seasons of fights, make-ups, a wedding and a baby. Heartland is a show about a family, and for a lot of viewers Ty became family. Some feel any new man changes who Amy is, and they mean it out of love for the character.
Fans who love Nathan aren’t wrong either. They waited years to see Amy smile again, and they’ve watched Nathan show up for her and for Lyndy. For many of them, a widow finding love again isn’t erasing the past—it’s just real life.
The show seems to be trying to hold both. Amy still talks about Ty, and places still remind her of him. Marshall even pointed out how art mimics life, sharing a story of a widowed friend who joked about the neighbour next door, only to marry him four years later. Marshall told TV Insider. “You never know what is going to happen.”
Amber Marshall even pointed out how art mimics life, sharing a story of a widowed friend who joked about the neighbour next door, only to marry him four years later.
After all these seasons, Amy has loved deeply, lost more than most, and is still deciding what comes next. No matter what she chooses, that boy in the loft will always be part of why she’s brave enough to love at all. For more on how the show kept going after him, see life on the ranch after Ty.
