Warning: Major spoilers ahead

In 1980, the police department are angry about an article Amelia has written for a newspaper, which criticises the investigation and implies that evidence is being ignored. The Police Chief and Kindt ask Hays to retract his statement included in the article, but he refuses to do so. Hays is offered two options – a demotion to an administrative role or quit. He chooses the former.

Amelia and Hays meet that evening and get into a fight, with Hays accusing Amelia of using him for her book. Later at a bar, Hays and Amelia have a conversation which ends with Hays proposing to Amelia.

In 1990, Hays heads off in the car with Hoyt – who knows everything about his investigation. In the woods, they exit the car to talk in private with Hoyt asking what happened to Harris. Hays plays dumb, so Hoyt reveals his cards, confessing that he had a tracker on Harris’s car and knows where his last known location was. Hoyt tells Hays to stop investigating, leaving him in the woods to make his own way home.

Amelia finds Hays in a bar, where she confronts him over his past behaviour. He reveals his plan to resign from the police. Elsewhere, West gets into a barfight with a motorcycle crew.

In 2015, Hays and West speak with Harris James’s widow to see if she ever saw Harris with a man with a milky eye. She reveals that someone matching that description came over to her house a few weeks after Harris went missing, asking whether Harris had found the girl. She recalls him introducing himself as ‘Junius’.

The pair decide to head to the now abandoned Hoyt mansion to see what they can find. Inside they find the pink basement, where there’s a painting on the wall with three individuals – a Princess Mary, Sir Junius and Queen Isabel.

With some help from the DMV, they get an address for a ‘Junius Watts’ and head over to his house. To their surprise he’s been expecting them to visit, as he was the person who was parked outside Hays’s house. Inside the house, Junius reveals all.

Isabel Hoyt lost her daughter and husband in a car accident, leaving her grief-stricken and unable to leave the house. At an employee picnic in 1979, Isabel spots Julie and notes her strong resemblance to her late daughter and asks to see her again. So, Junius approaches Lucy on the factory line to see if Lucy will allow Isabel to play with Julie - which she agrees to in return for money. But unbeknownst to Junius, Isabel stopped taking her medication and tried to take Julie. Will, trying to protect his sister, fights Isabel before she pushes him and he falls, hitting his head on a rock.

Harris James helped Junius cover up what happened, paying off Lucy and planting Will’s backpack under Brett’s porch. Junius reveals Julie was happy for many years, until he realised that Isabel had been giving her lithium from the age of 10. As she got older, Julie started asking questions about her old life, so Junius helped her escape. But she disappeared and he hasn’t been able to find her since.

Junius reveals he finally found Julie in 1997 at a convent, and the reason he was sitting outside Hays’ house is because he wanted to confess. He asks them to arrest him, but as they’re both retired, they can’t do that. West suggests if he can’t live with what he did then he should kill himself.

Hays and West visit the convent to find out more and are told Julie had HIV and are shown to her gravestone. As they leave the convent, they bump into the groundskeeper and his daughter, Lucy.

Despite having spoken with Junius and finally getting the information they were after, Hays and West don’t feel they’ve got closure. The next day, Hays reads a section from Amelia’s book where she speaks about Julie’s childhood friend Mike Ardoin, who was very upset about her disappearance because he always believed he’d marry her.

His hallucination makes him realise that the groundskeeper he bumped into at the convent is Mike and that his daughter, Lucy, could be Julie’s daughter. Could Julie’s death have been staged to protect her?

Hays gets his hands on Mike’s address and heads there. But as he pulls in, his memory fails him, and he can’t remember why he’s there. He calls Henry who tells him to ask the woman at the house for help, with Hays relaying the address to Henry over the phone so he can come and collect him. The woman offers him a glass of water, with his memory returning as he drinks it. Henry takes Hays home, where he heads out to play with his grandchildren.

Henry finds his father’s note with the address of the woman, deciding to keep it. Watching his grandchildren play on the grass, Hays reflects on the moment he asked Amelia to marry him, and the episode ends with a flashback to him in the woods in Vietnam.