The episode opens with an abandoned ship drifting into the port in Norfolk. The Coast Guard boards, finding no crew, no distress call, and only one clue Captain Lawrence Andrews, barely alive after a brutal attack. With the entire crew missing, the case is a mystery that demands answers.
Alec Mercer, behavioral science professor and FBI consultant, gets a call from Norfolk, the town where his father still lives. Despite unresolved family tensions, he heads there with Marissa to investigate. At the docks, they uncover a lone survivor, Quynh Le, hiding in the ship’s lower decks, too terrified to speak. When shown a picture of Andrews, Quynh visibly recoils. Suspecting trauma-induced selective mutism, Alec carefully gains his trust. When Quynh finally speaks, his words expose a horrifying truth: Captain Andrews had been enslaving him and his brothers, forcing them to work 18-hour shifts, beating them, and locking them below deck. The crew tried to escape, but Andrews sent men after them. Quynh barely survived.
As Alec and Marissa shift their focus to human trafficking, another shock halts their progress Captain Andrews is found murdered in his hospital bed, smothered to death. The investigation pivots again when they discover something even more sinister the ship wasn’t just used for forced labor, but for smuggling fentanyl. The missing crew, believed to be victims, might have played a role in the operation. Before they can act, masked men storm the ship, attempting to recover their lost cargo. Law enforcement ambushes them, leading to multiple arrests, but Alec is shaken when one of the men unmasks his childhood friend, Sawyer.
At the police station, Sawyer confesses that he was the middleman. The smugglers paid him to move product through the docks, and he blackmailed Andrews into cooperating. When Alec asks if he killed Andrews and tried to kill Quynh, Sawyer admits he had no choice the people he was working for would have killed him if he didn’t. His resentment toward Alec surfaces, accusing him of never understanding what it’s like to struggle, to feel stuck in a town where people work their whole lives just to break even. Alec listens but refuses to excuse his choices Sawyer could have walked away.
With the case closed, authorities locate the missing crew in South Carolina. They agree to cooperate, while Quynh and his brothers receive T-visas, ensuring their safety. Still, Alec struggles with Sawyer’s betrayal. Marissa encourages him to stop running from the past, to finally talk to his father.
At his father’s house, Alec asks where he was after the bombing that left him scarred. His father finally admits the truth he relapsed. Five years sober at the time, but when he got the call about Alec’s injuries, he couldn’t handle it. He drank himself into oblivion until the police found him in a gutter and took him to detox. He never drank again, but he never told Alec. Until now.
The confession shifts something between them. Alec had resented his father for being absent, but now he sees the guilt and pain he carried. Before leaving, Alec asks if his father would remove his scars if he could. His father tells him to do whatever makes him happy, but adds, “People with the most scars have the biggest hearts.”
As Alec stands by the docks, watching the waves crash against the shore, he realizes the past will always be part of him. But maybe, for the first time, it doesn’t have to haunt him.
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