So Cash goes to her. Not as a cop. Not as an investigator. Just as Cash — raw, unguarded, holding the weight of Kerry’s secret like a live wire in his palm. Harper stands at the threshold of her sun-dappled cottage, barefoot, hair still damp from the shower, eyes wide not with fear — but recognition. She knows. Not the full truth, not yet — but she knows something has shattered. The way he breathes. The silence before he speaks. The tremor in his knuckles as he grips the doorframe.

“I found it,” he says — voice low, stripped of protocol, of distance. “Kerry’s ledger. The names. The dates. The payments… made to her.”
Harper doesn’t flinch. She steps back — not away, but in. An invitation. A surrender to gravity. Because this isn’t about evidence anymore. It’s about confession. About trust burning hotter than suspicion.

Inside, the air thickens. Cash lays it out: how David’s obsession with control warped into surveillance; how he’d been tailing Kerry before her overdose, not after — hunting a ghost he’d already decided was guilty. How every “routine check” was a calculated incursion into her privacy, her dignity, her last fraying threads of autonomy. And then — the gut-punch — how Holden knew. Not just suspected. Knew. Saw David slip Kerry’s journal into his briefcase one rain-slicked afternoon outside the Surf Club. Watched him walk away — and smiled.

Because Holden doesn’t want justice. He wants chaos. And nothing fans chaos like a cop who’s lost his compass.

Meanwhile, across the bay, Tane stands before the Family Court, jaw clenched so tight it aches. His lawyer speaks in measured tones — “best interests of the child”, “stability”, “consistent care” — but all Tane hears is the echo of Mika’s small hand slipping from his own yesterday, as she turned to wave goodbye to her mother. He sees Riley’s face — not as the man who left, but as the father who tried, who came back broken but trying — and wonders if love is enough when the system only reads paperwork, not heartbeats.

And Riley? He’s sitting in a sterile hospital corridor, staring at the red “IN SURGERY” light above Neurology Room 3. Remi’s name glows beside it. One wrong move. One millimetre off. One second too long. The neurosurgeon’s briefing was clinical, precise — “high-risk resection”, “potential for permanent motor deficits”, “a decision that must be made now.” But Riley heard only one phrase cut through the static: “If we don’t operate tonight, the tumour could compress the brainstem within 48 hours.” So he signs. With a shaking hand. With tears he won’t let fall. With the quiet, terrifying certainty that loving someone sometimes means choosing their pain — because the alternative is watching them fade, breath by breath.

Back at the Pier, Holden leans against his black sedan, arms crossed, watching Lacey laugh with Leah on the boardwalk — carefree, unaware. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. His phone buzzes: a single photo. Lacey, sleeping. Blurred background — her bedroom. Sent from a number he doesn’t recognise. But he knows the source. David’s gift — wrapped in menace, delivered with a wink. Holden tucks the phone away. Doesn’t reply. Doesn’t need to. The message is clear: She’s already mine to watch. Soon, she’ll be mine to keep.

And John? He sits at the kitchen table in Justin and Leah’s house — a man displaced, humbled, adrift. The floodwaters have receded, but the damage remains: warped floorboards, the sour scent of damp plaster, the quiet tension in Justin’s voice when he asks, “How long do you think you’ll stay?” John stares at his hands — the same hands that once rebuilt half the wharf, now trembling as he tries to unscrew a jammed cabinet hinge. He doesn’t answer. Because he doesn’t know what comes next — only that this — this fragile, borrowed peace, this quiet ache of dependence — is the most terrifying thing he’s faced in years.

Summer Bay doesn’t burn with flames. It burns with choices — irreversible, intimate, detonated in whispers and glances and signed consent forms. It burns with love that