When Detective Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) comes across her former fiancé on a dating app — the man who left her 11 years earlier without a trace — she finally has an opportunity to get the answers she’s always wanted. But nothing is quite what it seems. Kat soon realizes that Josh (Ashley Walters) might be connected to a missing persons case she’s investigating, as well as her father’s murder. Now with more questions than ever, Kat begins to wonder who she can trust as she tries to uncover what really happened.
“Kat’s a detective, and she’s the head of the missing persons unit, and her fiancé disappears,” Eleazar tells Tudum. “And what I actually found interesting is that she never uses her skills to figure out where he went in those 11 years until he pops up on a dating site.” She adds, “I think she could have found out where he went, what happened, but I think she was afraid to find out why he left because that might be heavier. And if at the end of it she finds out that he left because he didn’t love her, that would be too much to bear.”
If you’ve reached the end of the limited series and are ready to untangle the web of mysteries, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for all the details about how this case unfolds, and check out the video deep dive below, featuring Missing You author and creator Harlan Coben, Eleazar, and Sir Lenny Henry, who plays Kat’s father, Clint.
Josh and Kat were engaged when he mysteriously left while Kat was grieving her father’s murder. “A lot of my questions coming into the show were surrounding the nature of her relationship with Josh,” Eleazar tells Tudum. “The biggest thing I found difficult was, what’s happened in that time period since him leaving and now, and why hasn’t she endeavored to contact him or find out what happened?” After 11 years, Kat finds Josh on a dating app and decides to swipe on him to get those answers. But before she can ask him why he left, Josh blocks her. When we finally see Josh again toward the end of Missing You, he’s living in a rural home with his young daughter. He tells Kat that he never stopped loving her all those years. But, as Coben explains in the video, “Josh left because he played a part in [Kat’s] father Clint’s murder.” More on that later.
Kat’s father was also a detective, and the official story is that he was murdered by a man named Monte Leburne (Marc Warren). But Kat doesn’t believe that Monte killed Clint, and she wants to know why he confessed to the murder. Her friend Stacey (Jessica Plummer) — a private investigator — uses her connections to get Kat access to the prison where Monte is being held on his deathbed. During her visit, Nurse Sally Steiner (Samantha Spiro) helps Kat get the answers she’s seeking by drugging Monte, who confesses that he was paid to take the fall for Clint’s murder. Later, Stacey retrieves a list of Monte’s visitors from the prison and learns that Josh visited him the day before he left Kat.
Amid everything coming up in her personal life, Kat is also investigating the case of a missing man named Rishi Migari (Rudi Dharmalingam). As the investigation continues, a young man named Brendan Fells (Oscar Kennedy) follows Kat to the police precinct and asks for her help finding his mother, who has been missing for six days. Brendan tells Kat that his mother, Dana Fells (Lisa Faulkner), left for a trip to Costa Rica with her boyfriend, and he hasn’t heard from her since. He later reveals that the man his mother is on a trip with is Josh, and says that the couple met on a dating app — the same app that Kat saw him on. But little does she know, Josh’s dating profile is a fake. Brendan tells Kat he found Josh’s Facebook profile under the name Reggie Cross. At this point, something isn’t adding up.
Later, Kat confesses to her boss, DCI Ellis Stagger (Richard Armitage), that she didn’t use official channels to visit Monte Leburne, and he suspends her from the case. Still, she uses her relationship with Charlie (Charlie Hamblett), a newbie detective described as a “tech whiz,” to help her continue the investigation. There are a number of reveals that come next. First, Charlie finds CCTV surveillance footage of Dana at an ATM. Next, Brendan speaks to Dana’s financial manager, who says she recently approved a transfer over the phone for a quarter of a million dollars from her account to a bank in Switzerland. The manager says that her boyfriend proposed to her, and they’re buying a house overseas. Then, Charlie tells Kat that Dana missed her flight and never made it to Costa Rica.
At this point, Kat asks Charlie for one more favor: There’s an unidentified fingerprint on the weapon that killed her father, and she needs his help finding out who it belongs to.
Josh’s fake dating profile was set up by a criminal organization run by an “insidious dog snob” named Titus (Steve Pemberton), as Henry describes him. Titus’ organization sets up fake dating profiles to catfish hopeful singles looking for love, and he uses his dog breeding business as a front for his criminal activity. Once Titus sets up a date with his matches, he has them kidnapped and forces them to turn over all their money if they ever hope to leave. (“As first dates go, I’d say that’s pretty bad,” Henry adds.)
We learn that both Dana and Rishi were widowers with hefty life insurance policies, making them prime targets for Titus. But that’s also how Kat was able to track him down — when she initially swiped on Josh’s fake profile, she became determined to find him, seeking the truth about why he ended their engagement and disappeared. As it turns out, Titus’ operation was using photos from archived Facebook accounts to create the fake profiles, Josh’s included.
Clint had a lot of secrets. Eventually, desperate for answers, Kat approaches Stagger. He tells Kat that her father was working for the crime boss Calligan (James Nesbitt), and that Stagger wanted to protect her from that truth. He tells Kat that Clint was trying to get out of working for Calligan, which is what got him killed. Kat then confronts her mother about all of Clint’s secrets, and learns that he had had an affair before his death. Finally, she comes face-to-face with Calligan and has the opportunity to ask him directly why he killed her father. But, he tells her, it wasn’t him.
“She gets revelation after revelation, and she doesn’t really have time to breathe,” Eleazar tells Tudum. “You almost want her to just stop and take a breath, take stock and move forward. But she doesn’t. She literally doesn’t have a moment to reflect on how much trauma she has been through, and how much trauma she’s still going through.”
Calligan knows Kat is poking around and sets up a meeting with her at an art museum. She asks Calligan for information about the person Clint had an affair with, and he later gives her an address. When she arrives at the home, Kat meets Parker (Cyril Nri), the man who was in a relationship with her father for 14 years. Parker tells her that Calligan was blackmailing Clint into working for him because he knew about the affair, and that Clint tried to break off their secret relationship because he didn’t want to deal with Calligan anymore. Parker tells Kat they were together the night of Clint’s death, but that he ran off in a panic and Parker never knew why.
“She can see that there’s a genuine pain and connection that he obviously had to her father,” Eleazar tells Tudum. “She understood how much this man loved her father and how much her father loved him. But in that moment, it was so hard. You’re [grieving] your father, who’s been murdered, but the fact that you didn’t know such a big part of him is a painful thing for Kat.”
We later learn that Kat’s friend Aqua (Mary Malone) saw Parker and Clint embracing the night of his death, which startled Clint. He ran off in a panic and called Stagger, looking for Aqua’s address. Clint confronts Aqua at her home and begs her not to tell Kat about his affair. Aqua says he should tell Kat himself, and that she hopes for him to live his life how he chooses. But Clint becomes more aggressive as he sees Kat calling Aqua, and so Aqua grabs a knife to defend herself. He takes the knife from her when Josh arrives and, while trying to protect Aqua, Josh accidentally stabs Clint. At that point, Stagger also arrives at Aqua’s house because he was worried by Clint’s demeanor over the phone. But he’s too late. “With the aim of protecting Kat and her mother from the truth, [Stagger] arranged for Monte Leburne, a criminal already set to be convicted of multiple murders, to take the fall for Clint’s murder, too,” Henry and Eleazar explain.
They do! Kat finds a website that she believes to be associated with Josh, and Stacey finds an address linked to the website — a PO Box under the name Reggie Cross in a rural town. Kat heads to the location and waits outside, and once a man finally arrives, she follows him to a cottage. She knocks on the door and tells the man she is looking for Reggie Cross, or Josh Buchanan, and he sends her away. Kat sees a little girl playing by the water and asks about Josh. Eventually, a man says, “I’m right here, Kat.”
In an interview with Tudum, Coben described the “electricity in the air” between Walters and Eleazar when they reunite. “You feel it the first time you see it,” he says, adding that this moment between them “is really special.”
Face-to-face with Josh after 11 years, Kat asks him if he knows Dana Fells, which he denies. He says that the dating profile is not his, and that his daughter had set up the Reggie Cross Facebook profile. Kat confronts Josh about leaving, telling him, “You walked out and left.” She tells him that she knows Josh was aware of her father’s corrupt history with Calligan and that he should have been honest with her instead of disappearing. At this point, they go their separate ways.
After some time passes, Josh turns back up at Kat’s apartment and tells her he’s been waiting for her for 11 years. She tells Josh that she doesn’t want to wait any longer to be with him and takes him back.
First, let’s wrap up some loose ends at Titus’ dog farm. After Kat’s exchange with Josh’s fake profile early on, Titus realizes that Kat must know the real Josh and wonders if she’s investigating him. At the end of the series, he tracks down her address and heads to her apartment. At that same moment, Brendan arrives at Kat’s apartment, and Titus receives a call that Dana has broken free and is on the run. So, Titus calls Brendan and tells him that his mother is in a nearby van, and lures him in and kidnaps him. Kat arrives back at her home as Brendan is kidnapped.
Now searching for Brendan, Kat receives a tip from a woman about a dog breeder who stalked her, which narrows down her search for Titus’ farm. When she arrives, Titus has set fire to the entire plot of land. Titus calls out to Dana and threatens to kill Brendan and shoots him in the leg. He screams out in pain, which lures Dana out, but Kat arrives just in time and shoots Titus before he can do more harm. Brendan and Dana are reunited.
But that still isn’t the end of the story for Kat. She and Josh have since reunited and reconnected when Charlie calls Kat to tell her that the fingerprint came back on the murder weapon. It turns out the second fingerprint belonged to Josh. When Kat starts piecing together that Josh was involved in her father’s death, he has to come clean about everything once and for all. He explains what happened the night Clint died and that it was an accident, and how he couldn’t stand to see Kat’s face every day as she grieved the loss of her father, knowing that he had killed him.
Now that Kat knows the truth, she must decide whether she can be with Josh. At the end of the series, she reaches toward him. “That was a really hard scene to shoot,” says Eleazar. “Both Ashley and I were shattered by the end of that day because it was so heavy.” But, she adds, “there’s something quite nice about her reaching toward him in the end. I think you could read that in many ways.”
As the series comes to a close, Kat and Josh’s song, “Missing You” by John Waite, plays.
