I Will Find You is the title of the new series from author Harlan Coben and showrunner and creator Robert Hull, but it’s also a promise. David Burroughs, the father at the heart of the new drama, will stop at nothing to find his son, long thought dead.

“The story is about a dad who’s accused of murdering his son and then finds out that he’s alive,” Sam Worthington, who plays David, told Netflix. “So he sets out on finding the truth.” 

That missing truth has already come at a cost. David has spent years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. His wife, Cheryl (Erin Richards), has left him and remarried, convinced that her son was murdered by her ex-husband. When Cheryl’s sister, Rachel (Britt Lower), turns up at the prison for a visit, David doesn’t know what to expect. Rachel is there to show David a photo that will change everything: It reveals his son, Matthew (Ashton Cressman), alive and well at an amusement park. 

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“It confirms what she’d already suspected — that something was wrong about David’s conviction,” Lower tells Tudum. “She’s someone who listens to her gut, and her instincts told her from the start that he was innocent.” Together, she and David embark on an unlikely odyssey to uncover Matthew’s kidnapper, with the help of Rachel’s ex-boyfriend, philanthropist Hayden (Milo Ventimiglia). 

It’s a journey full of twists and turns, but at its heart is a broken family finding a way to heal. “I think the series is about healing and never losing hope,” Worthington tells Tudum. “Hopefully finding his son will not only save David’s family, but also allow him to save himself.”

Read on to find out how David and Rachel find Matthew — and who’s responsible for his disappearance.

How does David break out of prison?

Everything about Matthew’s murder seems open and shut. His body was found in bed, though it was unrecognizable, as the little boy had been bludgeoned to death. Cheryl wasn’t home, called away to work a hospital shift after a major bus crash, so David was the only one present. DNA seemed to prove the body was Matthew’s, and a baseball bat belonging to David — the murder weapon — was found buried in the woods nearby. Neighbor Hilde Winslow (Tara Rosling) testified to watching him bury it. Though he proclaims his innocence, even David is convinced his son is dead. But when Rachel shows her photograph to David, he recognizes his son’s facial birthmark immediately. Matthew is alive. 

For David, the revelation wakes him up from a self-imposed emotional hibernation. “I wanted him to start in the worst place imaginable,” Coben told Netflix. “When he is accused of murdering his own son, he doesn’t fight so hard because his son is dead. Even if he’s able to prove his own innocence, his son is still not there.” The possibility of reuniting with Matthew, however remote, changes everything for the imprisoned father. He resolves to break out and find his son. 

Fortunately, David has a few friends inside: prison warden Philip Mackenzie (Peter Outerbridge) and the warden’s son, police detective Adam (Jonathan Tucker). The pair uncover a plot by corrupt prison employees to kill David, and they agree to help him escape. 

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Why did David’s neighbor help frame him?

Luckily for David, Rachel is an out-of-work investigative journalist with a talent for digging up the truth. She learns that Hilde Winslow moved to New York and changed her name to Harriet Winchester soon after David’s trial. “The tension that builds for Rachel is that in order to help David find his son, she has to not only break the law — aiding and abetting a fugitive — she also has to reopen these very tender wounds that her sister is only now just healing from,” Lower says. 

Rachel and David head to New York — but they aren’t the only people with an interest in the case. Wealthy philanthropist Gertrude Payne (Madeleine Stowe) is prowling around Cheryl for information about her ex-husband’s escape. 

After a corrupt prison guard turns up dead, father-daughter agents Sarah Greer and Max Williams (Logan Browning and Chi McBride) come to believe David is on a revenge-fueled killing spree, and that Hilde is his next target. Like Tommy Lee Jones’s iconic pursuer in The Fugitive, this pair are less interested in David’s potential innocence than they are in catching him. “He was in prison, he was convicted of a crime, he’s gotta go back,” McBride told Netflix. “The prisons and penitentiaries are filled with innocent people. You can sort that out after I catch you.”

The agents’ family relationship is another crucial story element. “We always want to keep the focus of ‘What are we trying to say? What’s the story really about?’” Hull tells Tudum. “And for us, this show is really about parents and children: What you're willing to do to protect them, what happens when you can’t protect them.”

To protect her family, Rachel calls up an old friend: ex-boyfriend Hayden, a wealthy bachelor who owns a penthouse in the city. “He’ll do anything for her,” Ventimiglia told Netflix. “When you’ve shared time and love as deep as Hayden and Rachel had, of course he’s going to show up for her.” 

When David and Rachel track down “Harriet,” they uncover a crucial piece of the puzzle. As it turns out, David’s former neighbor was coerced by mob boss Nicky Fisher (Clancy Brown), a hard-nosed local kingpin who offered to forgive her daughter’s gambling debt to get Hilde’s testimony in line. Hilde was led to believe that David was guilty but on the verge of getting away with it; she agrees to lead David to Skunk (Greg Bryk), Nicky’s henchman subordinate.

But the authorities close in on Hilde’s apartment, and David flees in a desperate rooftop chase. David escapes by leaping into a garbage truck, and Rachel is arrested, but he’s soon cornered back at the penthouse by Hayden. 

Hayden, David, and Rachel reach an uneasy alliance, with Hayden agreeing to continue helping the pair even if it may implicate him in David’s escape. A high-powered attorney quickly springs Rachel from prison. “Hayden’s admiration of David as a father in doing whatever he can to find his boy definitely resonates,” Ventimiglia said. “He has a heart. Helping David is helping a father get back to his son.”

David follows Hilde to Washington Square Park, where he grabs Skunk — but not fast enough to stop him from shooting Hilde. Skunk gives David a chilling answer when he’s asked where Matthew is: “Ask your father.” 

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Why wasn’t Cheryl at home the night Matthew was killed?

Elsewhere, David’s father, Lenny (Hugh Thompson), a former law enforcement officer, is conducting his own investigation — with a bit of a head start: He knows David couldn’t have buried the bat in the woods, because he and Philip did themselves, intending to protect David. Lenny and Adam have also uncovered something even more telling: Matthew’s grave is empty. 

All signs point to Nicky Fisher as the mastermind behind Matthew’s kidnapping, and Lenny turns to his old police files — but is stopped when a gun is pointed at his head. 

With Lenny missing, the truth about the bus accident all those years ago comes to light. David’s aunt Sophie (Kate Vernon) tells him what his father had uncovered before disappearing: There was no bus accident. Ronald Dreasen (Aaron Ashmore), the hospital administrator and Cheryl’s new husband, made it up.

Rachel tells Cheryl, who confronts her husband. He claims that he only made up the accident because of his workplace crush on Cheryl, but the damage is done; Cheryl is sick of being manipulated. 

David Spowart/Netflix

What does Nicky Fisher have to do with Matthew?

Suspecting Nicky Fisher is behind the scheme, David makes a dangerous play, attempting to take Nicky’s daughter, Lena (Anna Hopkins), hostage in order to trade her for his son. “I always looked at David’s escape as more of an ‘emotional escape’ from himself,” Worthington said. “And unfortunately, the more David pursues the truth, the more his actions jeopardize his soul.”

Fortunately for his soul, David is stopped by Skunk, aiming to tie off all of his employer’s loose ends. Only then does Skunk get a change of plans from the top, delivered by an unlikely messenger: Adam, who has been working for Nicky the entire time. 

The crew takes David to a private airplane that will fly directly to Nicky, but they’re cornered by the police, who have been tracking Skunk since they arrested and intentionally released him in New York as bait. In the ensuing shoot-out, Adam and David escape on the plane to see Nicky. 

Nicky tells David he blames Lenny (who he’s holding captive) for the death of his son, Liam, who killed a man in a drunken bar fight and was later murdered in prison. Nicky claims Liam would have gotten off if not for fabricated evidence planted by Lenny and Philip. He put out a hit on the two men, but was stopped by Adam, who offered to become Nicky’s man on the inside of the Boston Police Department in exchange for sparing their lives.

Now, the sins of the father have come home to roost: Nicky forces David to choose between saving his young son and Lenny, now cancer-ridden and weak with old age. With Lenny’s encouragement, David chooses Matthew, but Nicky spares the two men the pain, revealing the threat was a ploy to make sure David was innocent. Nicky has no idea where Matthew is; he took revenge for Liam’s death by fabricating evidence in David’s case, but draws the line at further punishing an innocent man. 

Nicky leaves David with some parting advice: The motive for Matthew’s disappearance may not have anything to do with him at all, but instead to do with Cheryl.

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

What happened to Matthew?

To finally find Matthew, David and Rachel look back to before he was even born, when David and Cheryl struggled to conceive. Recruiting Ronald to navigate the hospital, they discover a shocking truth: Cheryl visited a fertility clinic, and David may not actually be Matthew’s father. 

But Cheryl has another revelation to share. She did visit the clinic — but she was pregnant already. Matthew is David’s child, but there’s someone out there who doesn’t know that. And then Cheryl drops one final bombshell: She went to the clinic under Rachel’s name. Whoever took Matthew thinks he’s Rachel’s child. 

The final pieces fall together quickly. The photograph of Matthew at Six Flags was taken while the park was rented out for a private event, thrown by none other than Payne Industries. And in three missing photos from that day, Hayden — who is Gertrude Payne’s son — can be seen holding Matthew’s hand. 

The truth of Hayden’s involvement was always lurking under the surface of the series. “With the character of Hayden, we really wanted to play fair with the audience,” Hull says. “If you watch it a second time, we’re not trying to hide things. We started planting these seeds to where, hopefully, the ending feels both incredibly surprising and inevitable.”

Hayden called ending his relationship with Rachel “the biggest mistake of his life”; through Matthew, he believes he found a way to keep her. “What’s so devastating about the Hayden reveal is that Rachel has loved him for so long — as a friend, even after they broke up,” Lower says. “He was someone she always trusted, someone she went to for support. So the fact that he was at the center of it all makes it that much more heartbreaking.”

Ventimiglia played the role as if he was the sweetheart he originally appeared to be. “The one thing that I talked about with Robby [Hull] early on was, ‘Let’s not make him one-dimensional,’” he told Netflix. “He is acting from a place of love. It’s just misdirected, misguided, and completely inappropriate. I was able to cloak what he’s really up to with this outpouring of help and love that he’s giving to Rachel and, by extension, David.”

Hayden’s love leads him down a dark path: faking Matthew’s murder, framing David, and raising the young boy as his own. He murdered a terminally ill child who had been under the care of a Swiss orphanage run by his mother and used his body in place of Matthew’s, faking the DNA to keep up the ruse. When a Swiss detective (Tom Morton) turns up asking questions about the other child, Hayden kills him, tying off every possible loose end. His brutality even leads him to shoot his own mother when he learns she faked Matthew’s paternity test to make him believe he was the father.

With the help of Agent Greer, who’s been convinced of Hayden’s guilt, David and Rachel storm the Payne estate to rescue Matthew. Hayden makes a run for it, with Matthew in tow. It all ends in a shoot-out in the woods. David takes a bullet, and Greer finally takes out Hayden. It’s over, but David’s fate is up in the air.

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

How does I Will Find You end?

The series picks up eight months later, at Lenny’s funeral. David survived the gunshot wound, and his conviction was overturned. Rachel has written a book about the case, and Ronald and Cheryl have reconciled and welcomed a baby girl into the world. Adam lost his job for helping David escape, and started his own detective agency — free from Nicky Fisher’s influence. And Agent Greer took over as head of Boston’s Fugitive Task Force, with a little help from her father.

Most importantly, Matthew is back with his family. “I know the road ahead isn’t going to be easy,” David narrates. “Nothing worth fighting for ever is. What I do know is when it comes to Matthew, wherever that road leads, however dangerous or mundane, I’ll be by his side, every step of the way. And if he ever strays or gets lost or needs my help, I’ll find him and bring him back. I’ll always find him.”

The question of whether this family can still heal was less important to Hull and Co. than the question of how they would. “David will be there now for Matthew and, as hard a road as he may have to process everything that’s happened to him, they're going to deal with it together,” he says. “Where do we go from here? I don’t know, but we’ll go together.”

In the last moments of the series, David and Rachel share a moment, holding hands. “I love that the show ends there — in that quiet, reflective moment rather than a neat resolution,” Lower says. “Rachel and David have both been through profound loss and come out the other side with a deeper understanding of who they are and what really matters. They showed up fully — for Matthew, for their family, for each other — during the hardest chapter of their lives. That’s a pretty extraordinary foundation for whatever comes next. I think they face it with their eyes open.”

 I Will Find You is streaming on Netflix now.