Meghann Fahy and Rose Byrne in The Good Daughter —Mark Hill/PEACOCK

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Good Daughter finale.

Charlie Quinn (Meghann Fahy) is out the farmhouse door before the man on the lawn can reach the porch, her hair flying behind her, her voice barely above a whisper. What is he doing here, she wants to know. Mason “Huck” Huckabee (Jake McDorman) asks whether her sister is home. Her husband is, Charlie warns him. Huck says he is sorry about her father’s death. Behind the screen door, Samantha Quinn (Rose Byrne) has come close enough to hear him add that he has to speak with them both, and it’s important. Huck has been to this house before. The first time, he wore a mask, though Charlie doesn’t yet know that it was him behind that mask.

This confrontation opens the finale of The Good Daughter, Peacock’s six-part limited series adapted by Karin Slaughter, who wrote every episode, from her 2017 novel. More than 20 years earlier, two masked men came into the Quinn kitchen in Pikeville, Georgia, looking for Rusty (Brendan Gleeson), a defense attorney who represented the people nobody else in town would. They found his wife, Gamma (Olivia Williams), and his daughters instead. They killed Gamma. Sam took a bullet to the head and was left for dead. Charlie, the younger sister, escaped after Zach Culpepper sexually assaulted her. Police arrested Zach, who went to prison, and they shot dead his brother, Daniel, whom they named as the second assailant. The Culpepper family has always insisted Daniel was innocent, and we learn in the finale that they were telling the truth.

In the years that followed, the sisters grew up and then apart, Sam to patent law in New York, Charlie to a public defender’s desk in the town where it happened, until a fight in New York left them estranged. What draws them back together is a shooting at the local school that kills the principal, Doug Pinkman, and a young student named Emma. Kelly Wilson (Shayna Benardo), an intellectually disabled teenager who tends to tell people what they want to hear, is found with the gun in her hand, and Rusty takes her case. Huck teaches at the school, and Charlie had recently spent a night with him. Rusty dies quietly one night in Episode 4, before he can see the case through. By the finale, Sam has taken up Kelly’s defense, and Charlie has at last told her sister what Zach did to her in the woods.

The finale, “What Really Happened,” solves both crimes within its first 40 minutes, and the culprits are the same as in Slaughter’s novel. The aftermath is where the series largely goes its own way, changing a prison sentence and letting the sisters find a vital piece of their past together. “I’ve written a lot of crime novels, and one thing I think is very important to readers and viewers as well is this: a feeling that justice has been done, and that there’s hope, and those are very important guiding lights to all my writing,” Slaughter tells TIME. In this finale, whatever justice and hope the sisters find comes only after they have told each other the truth.

The second masked man

Meghann Fahy as Charlie, Jake McDorman as Mason ‘Huck’ Huckabee —Mark Hill/PEACOCK

Within minutes of the episode’s opening, Sam accuses Huck of an older crime: burning down the Quinns’ house more than 20 years ago, shortly before the masked men came. Back then, Huck’s sister, Annalie, had testified that a man raped her. Rusty was the man’s lawyer and, by Huck’s account, tore her apart on the stand. That same week, the family’s house went up in flames. “It was him,” Sam says. “He threw the Molotov cocktail.” Huck turns back with wet eyes. He says the fire was meant as a warning, but Rusty was back in court the next day. Annalie later died by suicide, and Huck, then 17, found her body. He blames Rusty for her death.

Ben (Michael Dorman), Charlie’s estranged husband, who has worked as a prosecutor, comes through the door at a run and takes Huck to the ground. “You brought Zach here,” Ben says between blows. “He murdered their mother. He raped my wife.” It was a secret Charlie had kept even from him, and hearing it from him seemingly catches her off guard. “To see Ben ultimately in such fierce defense of her in that moment, I think that somewhere in her, that feels good,” Fahy says.

The camera goes to Sam and holds. Byrne says she is playing an older sister’s sense of responsibility in that close-up, one that has grown heavier since the loss of both parents. “Being the eldest sibling is actually a lot of pressure, and I do feel like Sam carries that with her every waking moment of her day,” she says. The memory of that night arrives with the close-up: two hooded men in the doorway, Gamma still chatting, a young Sam who has seen them first. Gamma, as evenly as she can, offers the intruders the $50 in her purse and $200 more from a mason jar if they will only leave.

Back in the present, Charlie makes a connection. “You called him brother,” she says. “I called everyone brother,” Huck says. For more than 20 years, that word pointed to Zach’s actual brother, Daniel, and Charlie will later say she is the reason he is dead. Ben has found the rest upstairs, a confession in Huck’s own hand: at 17, he had paid Zach $5,000 to kill Rusty on the night of the attack. Ben sneers that Huck lacked the nerve to do it himself and had to get a Culpepper.

Huck’s defense comes out in pieces. He admits he was the second man in the mask all those years ago, but the girls were supposed to be at track practice that day. He says he stopped Zach, and a flashback to the woods shows him turning his gun on his partner as Sam tells her sister to run; it goes off, and the bullet strikes Sam in the head. He pulled Zach off Charlie, then ran six miles to call his parents, who would not let him turn himself in.

Neither sister will hear it. Charlie says Zach chased her down like an animal. “He was the weapon that you loaded,” she says. Sam is colder; she tells Huck he should have hanged himself in the barn beside Annalie. Huck answers that he went to war, then came home to teach.

Then Charlie goes quiet. “She feels very angry at Huck and very vulnerable because they hooked up at the beginning and she didn’t know, and I think that makes her feel sick,” Fahy says. Sam takes over the questioning, driven by what Byrne calls “her fury at this man who’s still sort of begging for forgiveness.” Huck now has both sisters against him, uniting them “on the same team in a way that we haven’t seen yet,” Fahy says.

Slaughter gives Huck this much. “He was a very scared 17-year-old, and he did have a bad thing happen to him,” she says. “Now, it’s not a justification; it’s an explanation.” As for the lifetime of atonement he claims, she says viewers have only his word for it.

The secret Rusty kept for a decade

Brendan Gleeson as Rusty, Rose Byrne as Sam —Mark Hill/PEACOCK

The rest of what Huck has to say is about Rusty. Sam already knows about the payments, $2,000 a month to Zach’s son so that Zach would never name his accomplice. Huck explains that his parents set them up after the attack, in a bargain brokered by the old Sheriff Coin, whose family still runs the law in Pikeville. Huck heard of it 10 years ago from his dying mother, and after her death he came to the farmhouse to confess. Rusty did not call the police, because he would not blow up his daughters’ lives with new trials, appeals and lawsuits. He made Huck hand over the money and took over the payments himself, then sat him down at the kitchen table to write a confession to the attack, the same pages Ben found upstairs that morning. Asked whether Rusty forgave him, Huck says no: Rusty called him one of two men on Earth he never would.

Rusty also told him why he held on to the confession. One day his daughters would have to decide whether to keep paying Zach’s family for Zach’s silence or give the confession to the police, and Rusty did not want the truth to reach them all at once. He put it in the words of an Emily Dickinson poem he and Gamma used to quote, and Sam finishes the line as her eyes fill with tears: the truth “must dazzle gradually.” “So it’s up to you now,” Huck says. “Both of you.” The scene cuts to squad-car lights pulsing blue in the dark. Huck is in handcuffs, arrested for now on a lesser charge: stealing the revolver used in the school shooting.

Slaughter says Rusty learned the truth when his daughters weren’t speaking. She also points to Charlie, who said on the night of the attack that she didn’t want anyone to know what Zach did to her. “I know from talking to survivors of assault that what they feel the loss of most is that sense of safety, and that sense that when they say ‘no,’ that will be honored,” Slaughter says. “I think it was really hard for Rusty to honor that, but he did, because that’s what Charlie wanted.”

Byrne says Sam finally understands how far her father went to protect Charlie. “I don’t know if she necessarily agreed, but I think he was between a rock and a hard place,” she says.

The price of being the good daughter

Audrey Grace Marshall as young Sam, Olivia Williams as Gamma —Mark Hill/PEACOCK

Nothing in Huck’s written confession mentions that Zach assaulted Charlie in the woods. So in the kitchen, while Sam deals with the police, Charlie asks Ben how he knew. Ben says Rusty told him shortly before he died, and called his agreement to stay silent the hardest decision he ever made. Charlie won’t let that stand. “It wasn’t a decision. It was a promise,” she says. “It was my secret.” Ben’s answer is gentle. “You only keep secrets when you’re ashamed. And he was never ashamed of you,” he says.

So Charlie tells him the rest. There was a miscarriage years ago, on a visit to Sam in New York, that she passed off as an infection. (She had three miscarriages in all.) She believes the assault is why she cannot carry a child to term, and she spent years punishing Ben for failing to guess. Ben asks whether a doctor ever told her so. None did. Then, to make her laugh, he lists his own humiliations, among them that he was the sole member of a Star Trek fan club, and tells her it doesn’t matter to him whether they can have children.

“The truth came out, and it’s only when that happens that I think she’s able to realize what keeping the secret did to her and to the people that she loved,” Fahy says. Now Charlie tells the truth, and “everyone’s still there to love her.”

Slaughter says the sisters had never really talked about what happened. “They’re hyper-articulate women, but they never say what they need to say,” she says.

They say it on the porch steps, where they finally settle what to do about the attack. Charlie wants to leave it alone, and Sam shows her that leaving it alone will be enough. Once the checks stop, Zach will talk. Sam tells her it really is that simple, as long as Charlie is out of Pikeville. It may be the first decision about that night the sisters have made together, and Charlie suspects their father planned it that way. She thinks he sent Sam to the farmhouse to look for an old photograph of Gamma, knowing the search would lead both of them to the record of the payments, and, eventually, Huck’s written confession. 

Until this week, Charlie had entrusted the truth about the woods to almost no one besides her father and Judith Pinkman (Paula Malcomson), who took her in on the night of the attack and now teaches at the school. Judith, it turns out, has been keeping a secret of her own.