Upon returning home, Ro finds Griff in a shed, clearing out decades of their shared belongings in anticipation of having to move. The task is emotionally difficult as they uncover items like an old pinball machine and a child’s bike that spark painful memories of Sam. While sorting through a box of Sam’s old possessions, Griff finds four of Warren’s father’s running medals, and they’re both surprised. The medals always hung on the wall of Warren’s study.

Ro tells Griff what Della learned from Meaghan about the incident between Darcy and Jacob. In return, Griff reveals a long-held suspicion: On the night Sam disappeared, he called Jacob and Darcy separately to ask about Sam’s whereabouts. Though they acted as if they were in different locations, Griff could hear a turbine in the background of both calls, suggesting that they were both somewhere near the quarry, yet neither mentioned that the other was right there beside them. The emotional weight of the memories and new suspicions leads to an argument, rehashing the old conflict over Ro’s decision to leave Carralon Ridge. Griff ends the conversation by telling Ro to leave if the task is too hard for her.

In her hut, Ro recalls having seen the velvet display case of running medals in Warren’s study. She also remembers that after Warren’s death, his brother Damien cleared out the house and offered Griff a share of the money from selling the contents, which Griff declined.

Ro reviews Sam’s interview files on her laptop again. The transcript of his conversation with Zach and Kyle confirms that the boys were deeply bored and frustrated with their life in the dying town. The interview with his friends Darcy and Jacob reveals their awareness of their families’ deep roots in Carralon Ridge, coupled with frustration over the lack of opportunities. As Ro reads the transcript of Sam’s discussion with his two closest friends, she senses a faint, unspoken understanding between them—a shared secret that was never verbalized but seemed to hang in the subtext of their conversation.

After Della mentions seeing Griff leave looking upset, Ro finds him at Warren’s abandoned house. He’s using a chainsaw to cut up the branches that crashed through the back porch. While he works, Ro explores the decaying house, walking through the empty rooms and entering what was once Warren’s study, where she examines the sun-faded outline on the wall where the medal collection used to hang.

She returns to the porch to help Griff, and together they work to free the section of the branch that’s jammed in the decking. As Ro pulls a rotten plank free, it gives way suddenly, and she sees a small, metallic object flash in the light as it falls into the dark, hollow space beneath the porch.

Upon closer inspection of the broken decking, Ro and Griff discover dark stains along the inner edges of the boards, which Ro identifies as old blood. She reaches into the hole and retrieves a silver key. They notice that the key’s shape matches a small, unstained gap in the blood, suggesting that it was wedged between the planks before the blood fell. They try the key in all the available locks, but after failing to find a match on Warren’s property, they return home.

Damien and Della join them to compare all their collective spare keys, but they’re unable to identify a match. Damien warns them that he doesn’t trust Sylvie, describing her behavior during the sale of Warren’s house as that of someone who wanted the deal done without being seen to push for it. Later, Griff recalls a strange detail from the day he and Sam found Warren’s house empty: The sausages on the barbecue were mostly cooked normally but were burned on the bottom where they touched the grill, as if Warren had been abruptly distracted and forgotten to turn them.

Ro drives into the deserted town center to test the key on various locks. It doesn’t fit the doors at Sylvie’s pub or the entrance to her attached flat. Ro proceeds down the street, methodically trying the key on the boarded-up doors and padlocks of several abandoned buildings, but finds no match.

She eventually arrives at Damien’s town house. Hesitantly, she tries the key in his front door. To her shock, it slides into the lock perfectly. However, when she tries to turn it, it won’t budge. Relieved but unsettled, Ro steps back into the street just as she sees Sylvie’s vintage Ford Capri returning to town and parking outside the pub. She decides to ask Sylvie about the key and the blood, as she lived with Warren for six years at the house.

Ro finds Sylvie outside the pub, visibly distraught. Sylvie explains that her mother, who lives in nearby Blenheim, has just had a mini stroke. Inside the pub, Ro shows Sylvie the key and the photos of the bloodstained decking. Sylvie claims to know nothing about either.

Ro then confronts her with the page from Sam’s notebook containing the question about Sylvie’s connection to Warren and the Lentzer mine. Under pressure, Sylvie agrees to tell Ro what she knows, saying it’s for Warren’s sake. She confesses that she had been pressuring him to sell his property to the mine. Their disagreement over the sale had become so severe that she had moved out of their home and into the apartment above the pub. She explains that her motivation was to sell their assets so that they could move to Blenheim, where she could be closer to her ailing mother. She didn’t understand how he could prioritize keeping the house over having a relationship with her or being able to care for her mother.

Sylvie reveals the full story of her last conversation with Warren. On the night he died, he called and told her that he had changed his mind and planned to sell the house because she was more important to him. However, Sylvie, still angry about his long refusal and the fact that the mine’s offer had since decreased, argued with him instead of reconciling. She was ashamed of her reaction and never told anyone that he had agreed to sell, partly to protect his reputation in the anti-mine community.

Sylvie tells Ro that although her conversation with Warren had been completely private, Sam somehow knew about it. The day before he disappeared, Sam visited her and asked if it was true that Warren had decided to sell just before he died. Fearing the repercussions for her and the damage to Warren’s reputation, Sylvie lied and denied it.

After her conversation with Sylvie, Ro leaves the pub and goes across the street to call Griff. While they’re on the phone, she hears a metallic clanging noise nearby. Griff, watching the area from the ridge for his job, tells her that he saw Darcy’s car in that area just a short while ago. Ro hangs up and walks toward the sound to investigate, asking Griff to keep watch over her.

Ro traces the noise to the old medical center and finds Heather’s sons Kyle and Zach inside, smashing a filing cabinet with a cricket bat out of boredom. She learns that Darcy gave them a lift into town, believing they were going to the sports oval to play rugby.

Ro drives the boys home. There, she has a brief, tense conversation with Bernie, who defends the family’s decision to remain in the dying town even in spite of how it’s hurting the boys. Before leaving, Ro confronts Darcy and Jacob, who are working on a motorbike. She tells them that they owe it to Sam’s memory to tell the truth about what Della has been asking them.

To test a theory, she tries the key from Warren’s porch in the lock of Darcy’s family home’s front door; it doesn’t fit. She gets in her car and drives away as the two young men watch her go.

Ro drives to the isolated spot where Sam’s car was found five years earlier. She reflects on how the community’s rigid stance against selling to the mine created an atmosphere of suspicion that prevented people from being honest with one another, even as they all felt the pressure and need to do so.

As she’s leaving, Jacob appears on his bicycle. He tells Ro that he’s ready to tell the truth about what happened. He states that the secret is connected to a collection of Warren’s father’s running medals. Ro tells him to put his bike in the back of her car, deciding that Griff needs to hear his explanation as well.