Ash and Dee Dee are driving south after just murdering Elena. Using Elena’s phone, Dee Dee intercepts Simon’s texts. To prevent Simon from becoming suspicious of Elena’s silence, Dee Dee invents a story about a trip to Canada and sends it to him.

Ash, who usually avoids knowing the motives for his jobs, asks Dee Dee for an explanation. Dee Dee reveals that Casper Vartage had numerous children by different cult members. However, to fulfill a prophecy about two male heirs, he sold all his other sons into illegal adoptions. Now, thanks to consumer DNA websites, these abandoned sons have started finding one another, threatening the inheritance of Vartage’s two designated heirs, “the Visitor” and “the Volunteer.” Ash and Dee Dee have been hired to murder all the newly discovered sons. With this new complication, they add Simon to their list of targets.

Simon and Cornelius wait outside the bank, awaiting the funds to pay Rocco for information. To avoid raising red flags with a second large withdrawal, Yvonne withdraws the cash from her own account. While they wait, Simon asks Cornelius why he has helped his family. Cornelius replies that Ingrid was kind to him and that it was a rare opportunity to be a hero.

Later, at the hospital, Yvonne confesses to Simon that she knew Paige had been raped. Paige swore her to secrecy, and she helped Paige get private counseling, but her goddaughter eventually cut off contact. Simon is furious that Yvonne withheld this information. When he demands to know if she told Ingrid, Yvonne says, “I never said a word. To you” (359). Before she can clarify further, Cornelius knocks to say that Rocco is ready.

Ash and Dee Dee arrive in the Bronx. They see a new text on Elena’s phone from Simon, stating that he’s heading to Cornelius’s apartment. Upon spotting Simon and Cornelius entering the building, they realize that they will have to abandon their plan for a quiet stabbing in favor of a “gun massacre.”

Inside Cornelius’s apartment, Rocco keeps Luther stationed nearby in the hallway. When Simon pays him, Rocco reveals that two days after Aaron Corval’s murder, Paige was seen taking a bus from Port Authority to Buffalo. Rocco adds that Luther has a much bigger secret to reveal—one so significant that Simon will pay them for their silence. As Rocco moves to let Luther inside, Luther shouts a warning just as gunfire erupts through the door.

Minutes earlier, Ash and Dee Dee enter the building and mistakenly go to Paige’s old third-floor apartment. They kick in the door to find that it’s an empty, sealed-off crime scene. A neighbor directs them to Cornelius’s apartment on the second floor. As they prepare to burst in, Luther arrives in the hallway and, seeing them, shouts a warning to Rocco.

The narrative returns to the shootout. Rocco is killed instantly when he opens the door. Ash fires down the hall at Luther while Dee Dee shoots Rocco again before aiming at Cornelius. Simon dives forward, slamming the door into Dee Dee’s arm to spoil her shot. He then tackles Cornelius, sending them both crashing through a window onto the fire escape. As they fall, Cornelius fires his own gun and hits Ash, killing him. Wounded himself, Simon shoves Cornelius down the fire escape to safety. Dee Dee appears in the broken window and aims at Simon, but an old woman in a strange uniform suddenly appears and pushes her out the window. Before Simon loses consciousness, the woman, Mother Adiona, tells him that their children will now be safe.

A month later, Simon is recovering from his injuries. The police have pieced together the story of the Shining Truth cult and its plot to murder the leader’s abandoned sons. 

Mother Adiona visits Simon in the hospital, explaining that she used a DNA service to find her own son, Nathan Brannon, who had been sold into adoption. When she discovered that the cult had murdered Nathan’s half-brothers, also sired by Casper Vartage, and planned to kill her son, she intervened. She claims to know nothing about Paige’s whereabouts and then vanishes. 

Desperate, Simon travels to Buffalo but finds no leads. He returns late one night to Ingrid’s hospital room and finds Paige sitting by her mother’s bed.

Paige explains that she has been at a secluded rehab facility for a month with a strict no-contact policy. After Aaron’s murder, she went there immediately for addiction treatment. She reveals that Ingrid knew about the retreat and had taken her there once before, prior to Simon’s encounter with her in Central Park; Ingrid herself had attended the same retreat years ago.

On the long drive back to the facility, Simon questions Paige’s story about Aaron’s death. Paige claims that she killed Aaron after he beat her, but Simon tells her that he knows the truth. He has deduced that Ingrid killed Aaron to save Paige’s life. Luther saw Ingrid leaving Aaron’s apartment the night of the murder, and when he later spotted her near Rocco, he feared that she would come for him too. Consequently, he shot her first in an act of self-defense. Paige confirms his theory. She recounts returning to the apartment and finding Ingrid covered in blood. The shock of seeing what her mother had done for her became her rock bottom. She begs Simon never to let Ingrid know that he knows the truth.

Months pass, and life improves dramatically. Ingrid makes a full recovery, and Paige, now home from the retreat, is thriving. The family returns to a happy, stable routine, but the unspoken secret about Aaron’s murder remains.

One evening in Central Park, Ingrid senses that Simon knows and confesses to killing Aaron. She explains that she did it to protect Paige, to ensure that one parent would remain free to raise their children if she were caught, and because she feared that Simon might have tried to stop her. They reconcile, and Simon feels a moment of pure bliss, though he knows that one secret still remains unspoken between them.

A year later, Simon and Cornelius attend the funeral for Elena, whose body has finally been found. On the drive home, Simon stops in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to visit Doug Mulzer, the student who sexually assaulted Paige.

Back in New York, Simon confronts Paige with the final piece of the puzzle. He explains that Doug told him that during the retaliatory beating, Aaron screamed, “No one hurts my sister” (399). Simon thus realized that Aaron and Paige shared the same mother. Yvonne confirmed that, as a teenager, Ingrid had been in the Shining Truth cult and gave birth to a son whom the cult leaders told her was stillborn. She was later deprogrammed at the same retreat she brought Paige to.

Paige confirms everything. She took a DNA test and discovered that Aaron was her brother, leading to an unhealthy, codependent relationship. He “protected” her by assaulting Doug and then kept her addicted to drugs to control her and get revenge on the mother who gave him away. Paige’s true rock bottom was not just that her mother became a killer for her but also that she had forced her mother to unknowingly kill her own son. She begs Simon to keep this secret from Ingrid, convinced that the truth would destroy her.

At the family dinner table, surrounded by his happy wife and children, Simon weighs the consequences. He decides that protecting Ingrid from this unbearable truth is more important than revealing it. He makes a silent vow to carry this one last secret forever.