Nic Monroe works at Funland, an arcade in Mishawaka, Indiana. One day, she notices a woman in her mid-thirties sitting alone at a table. The woman nods at Nic and then turns back to staring at her drink. Concerned that the woman is not there with any children, Nic alerts her manager Brad.

Nic has worked at Funland for eight years—Brad, who is friends with her parents and like an “uncle” to Nic, got her the job. She didn’t expect to work there this long, but now she is stuck trying to pay off fines and a lawyer for a DWI she recently got.

Nic expresses concern about the woman watching her, but Brad initially dismisses her. She backs down, telling herself she is just being paranoid after what happened to her sister seven years ago.

After Funland closes, Nic goes out to her bike in the parking lot. She hears someone call her name and turns to see the woman emerging from the shadows. The woman asks to talk about Nic’s sister, but Nic is rude to her, thinking of all the people who have tried to talk to her over the years—reporters, podcasters, or just people who have seen her sister’s story. She angrily dismisses the woman and then gets on her bike to ride away.

The woman stops Nic by saying that her sister also disappeared, just like Nic’s sister, Kasey. The use of Kasey’s name makes Nic remember her disappearance back in 2012.

Nic woke up one morning after a night of partying, something she and Kasey did regularly back then. After not finding Kasey at home, she realized that her sister must have taken the car. Annoyed because they were supposed to drive to work together, she tried texting and calling Kasey several times with no answer, then caught the bus for work.

After work, Nic walked to the record store where Kasey worked. She learned from Kasey’s coworker Lauren that Kasey never came to work that day. It was then that Nic realized no one had heard from her all day.

In the present, the woman introduces herself as Jenna Connor. Her sister Jules went missing at the same time as Kasey, seven years ago. She wants to talk about Kasey’s case, but Nic refuses. She remembers the connection between the two disappearances and insists that the police looked into any connections between the two cases back then. Even though they occurred in separate towns, everyone had always assumed it was the same culprit, even though they never found anything linking them.

Jenna tells Nic that she has something the police never saw: Jules’s diary. She insists that something in it connects Jules to Kasey, but she refuses to tell Nic about it until they talk about Kasey. Begrudgingly, Nic agrees to speak with her, and they go to Nic’s apartment.

As they enter, Nic thinks of how embarrassing her apartment is. Her rent is extremely cheap, as her job doesn’t pay well. It is run-down, with food stains on the counters, dead plants, and an old litter box from a cat she used to own.

Jenna asks Nic to tell her about Kasey. Nic is hesitant, having done her best to “numb” the memories over the years, but she decides it’s worth it to talk about it. She tells Jenna that Kasey was her opposite, responsible and hard-working. She was home after her first year at Arizona State and was studying to be a nurse. For most of their lives, as their father worked a lot and their mother had an alcohol use disorder, Kasey was always the one to care for Nic.

Struggling with the memory, Nic goes into the kitchen to try to find a bottle of wine. However, after she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she threw away most of her alcohol. Instead, she finds peanut M&Ms to eat, a trick that AA taught her to deal with her cravings.

When Nic returns to the living room, Jenna takes out a notebook. She asks Nic to tell her about the day Kasey disappeared.

After Nic talked to Kasey’s fellow employee Lauren, she went home and found the police there. They told her that Kasey’s car was found up in Michigan on the side of the road, the driver’s door open and all her belongings still inside. The only information they had to go on was that two weeks earlier, Jules’s car had been found the same way.

Now, Jenna tells Nic that she was the one who found her sister’s car. Jules was a bartender at Harry’s Place in South Bend. One night after work, she didn’t come home, so Jenna went out looking and found her car broken down by the side of the road.

Nic remembers hearing about Jules’s case for the first time. She used to drink at Harry’s Place because it was one of the bars that didn’t ask people for proof of age. The police were there a couple of weeks before Kasey went missing, asking if anyone had seen anything suspicious in the bar.

Jenna asks Nic to talk about Kasey’s past. She hopes that she can find some connection between Kasey and Jules from their childhood or in the months before their disappearance. She reasons that they both must have known the person who kidnapped them.

The two women go through their sisters’ pasts. Although they lived nearby, they went to different schools and participated in different extracurricular activities. Jenna tells Nic that she and her sister had moved to Osceola shortly before Jules disappeared.

After over an hour of discussing the past, Nic asks how Jenna can talk about everything so calmly. Jenna tells Nic that her mother is dying of cancer; she hopes that she can find out what happened to Jules before she dies. She gets Nic’s phone number so that she can send her a copy of the notes she has been taking.

Nic then insists that Jenna tell her what was written in Jules’s diary. Embarrassed, Jenna admits that there is no diary—she lied to try to convince Nic to talk. She tries to apologize, insisting that she needed a way to get information, but Nic is extremely angry and forces Jenna to leave.

After Jenna is gone, Nic rides her bike to a nearby grocery store. She buys several bottles of wine and drinks until she falls asleep.

The next day, Nic goes to the animal shelter where she volunteers as part of her community service for her DWI. As she sits on the floor with a one-eyed cat named Banksy, she thinks about what Jenna said. She is angry that Jenna destroyed her “numbness,” but she keeps thinking that maybe Jenna is right; they knew their sisters better than the police and might find something they missed.

Two days later, Nic goes to her AA meeting. She has been going every Monday for four months, even though she “resents” it. Their chairperson, Nancy, discusses step eight of the 12 Steps to recovery. Nic struggles to stay engaged as she thinks of Jenna. One thing in particular—the fact that Jenna and Jules moved to Osceola because Jules was in a “funk”— seems important to Nic but she can’t remember why. Then, Nic suddenly remembers that she wasn’t honest with the police during the investigation.

Nic thinks back to a few weeks before Kasey went missing. She went into Kasey’s room one night to ask her about a party, and Kasey was uncharacteristically rude and dismissive. She insisted that she was just stressed, but Nic felt like something more was going on. Now, she thinks of how she never told the police that Kasey seemed to be, like Jules, in a “funk.”

Additionally, before Nic left for the party that night, Kasey was adamant that she be careful. Remembering the look in her eyes, Nic thinks that Kasey was scared. Nic never mentioned this specifically to the police, and now she wonders if it is relevant.

That night, Nic gets several text messages from Jenna, apologizing for lying to her. Nic starts to reply, then decides she isn’t ready to forgive. Instead, she goes through the notes from their conversation that Jenna sent. She sees that, just before moving to Osceola, Jules worked at a place called Famous Jake’s BBQ. Having no other ideas, she gets the address for it online and decides to visit.

The next morning, Nic goes to Famous Jake’s and discovers that the place closed a few years ago and then reopened as Mesquite Barbeque. Nic is shocked when she sees that it is in the same building as the record store where Kasey worked.

Nic takes out her phone to call Jenna. She hesitates, still upset with her, then decides that she has no one to talk to about this discovery. If nothing else, it will give her a “friend” for the first time in years.

Nic goes to Jenna’s apartment and is shocked to find an entire wall dedicated to the investigations, with news articles, maps, and more. They have lunch together, and Nic realizes that it is the first time she has had fresh food in a long time, especially with how tight her budget is, with lawyer fees and fines.

They decide that it’s possible that both Kasey and Jules met someone at their work that scared them. For Jules, it would have been 2009 when she worked at Famous Jake’s, and for Kasey, it would have been in 2012 at the record store.

The only coworker of Kasey’s that Nic can remember from that time is Lauren. Jenna suggests Nic look for her on Facebook, so Nic logs in for the first time in years. At Jenna’s suggestion, Nic sends Lauren a message asking to meet for coffee to talk about Kasey.

A week after they sent the message, Nic and Jenna talk on the phone. Jenna points out that Lauren read it, as well as Nic’s follow-up messages, she just chose not to answer. They decide to go to Lauren’s church to try to talk to her.

Nic and Jenna sit through the church service. Nic spots Lauren and is immediately uncomfortable with how different she is. She thinks she looks “phony”—like she is trying to fit in with the other mothers—when that is not the type of person she was at all years ago.

Afterward, Nic confronts Lauren in the parking lot. The smile fades from Lauren’s face when she sees Nic, but she immediately replaces it and pretends to be happy to see her. She apologizes for not messaging Nic back, and Nic suggests they talk now. Lauren tries to make excuses for why she can’t but eventually relents.

Nic asks Lauren about her summer working with Kasey, but Lauren points out that she only worked there part of the summer—in July, she started working next door at Mesquite Barbecue. Nic insists that that can’t be right, as she remembers going into the record store and finding Lauren there the day Kasey went missing. Lauren tells her that their conversation happened outside, not in the record store—Lauren saw Nic through the restaurant’s window and went out to see if she was okay.

The revelation shocks Nic, as she has always remembered going into the record store and finding Lauren working there. It unsettles her that her memories from that day could be wrong. She is also bothered by the fact that Kasey never told her that Lauren stopped working at the record store. Between that and her strange behavior before she disappeared, Nic is feeling more and more like Kasey was hiding things from her.

Jenna asks Lauren if she remembers any strange customers or employees from either the restaurant or the record store. Lauren explains that she told the police about the manager of Mesquite. His name is Steve McLean, but they used to call him “Skeevy Steve” because of how uncomfortable he made the girls who worked there. He smoked outside by the dumpster, so anyone who worked at either place tried to avoid taking out the trash and being alone with him. Nic wonders what Detective Wyler, who’d been in charge of Kasey’s case, did with that information.