I Will Find You Ending Explained: What Really Happened to Matthew?

This article contains spoilers for I Will Find You

Netflix’s latest Harlan Coben thriller series has finally arrived on the streamer, and it’s full of the kind of twists and turns you’d expect from one of the author’s compelling stories.

In I Will Find You, we meet David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) who is serving a life sentence for the murder of his son Matthew, a crime he didn’t commit. All the facts lined up for the prosecution during David’s trial, including DNA evidence and a key witness who claims to have seen him bury the murder weapon, but it’s still clear that David has been wrongly imprisoned.

When his ex-sister-in-law, Rachel Mills (Britt Lower), suddenly comes to visit him in prison five years after his sentencing, David is surprised. He assumes that everyone in the family hates him, including his ex-wife, Cheryl Dreason (Erin Richards). But Rachel used to be a respected reporter, and she has stumbled across something astonishing.

It turns out that an old college friend of Rachel’s recently visited Six Flags in Springfield, and Matthew appears to be in the background of one of the images she captured there. David doesn’t really know what to make of the photo, but he spots a birthmark on the boy’s cheek. It’s the same birthmark Matthew had.

Let’s break down what really happened to David’s son in I Will Find You and how the series ends.

Did Someone Really Kill Matthew?

David suspects that Matthew is still alive and well, but he knows there is only so much he can do with this information from his prison cell. When threatening forces find out that David and Rachel have started poking around, David is attacked in prison, and it’s clear that someone out there doesn’t want him and Rachel investigating the crime further.

David voices his concerns to the prison’s warden, Philip Mackenzie, who looks out for him because he’s old friends with David’s ex-cop father. Mackenzie takes David’s suspicions about Matthew’s death seriously and visits David’s family in Boston, along with his son Adam, who is David’s best friend and an acting police sergeant. Mackenzie also tells Adam about the photo of Matthew, and the pair embark on a plan to break David out of prison so he can try to figure out what really happened to his son. They’re successful, and David and Rachel begin their frantic investigation into Matthew’s questionable death.

We also meet Hayden Payne (Milo Ventimiglia) Rachel’s wealthy ex-boyfriend. He’s the son of Payne Foundation heiress Gertrude Payne (Madeleine Stowe) and still has strong feelings for Rachel, but she’s moved on. Still, the pair remain close friends and confidants, so Hayden helps Rachel and David as much as possible in their quest to uncover the truth about Matthew.

Rachel and David soon discover that the key witness at David’s trial was paid to say she saw David burying a bloody baseball bat in the woods near his home, but it was his father who actually buried it, assuming that David had accidentally killed Matthew during a night terror and wanting to protect him.

DNA at the crime scene was also altered to appear to be Matthew’s. In fact, the DNA belonged to Martin, a dying child who vanished from a Swiss orphanage run by the Payne Foundation three weeks before Matthew was supposedly killed. A further DNA test proves that it wasn’t Matthew’s body that was found at the scene. Matthew is very much alive.

Why Was Matthew Taken?

When David and his wife Cheryl first tried to have a baby, they struggled to conceive. Cheryl began to lose hope that she could have a child with David, so she looked into the possibility of using donor sperm and visited a fertility clinic behind David’s back.

David suggests that the donor from the fertility clinic, Berg Reproductive, was the one who may have kidnapped Matthew and set David up, having decided to snatch his biological child back from David and Cheryl. Luckily, the clinic is part of Payne Medical Group, and that means Hayden has access to its files. But when David, Cheryl, and Hayden get to the clinic, they discover that Cheryl is not in Berg’s files. Hayden then recalls that five years previously, Berg had fired a doctor whom they suspected was impregnating his own patients, suggesting the doctor (or the Payne Foundation) may have wiped the archives clean to cover up the scandal.

David and Rachel track the doctor in question down, but find out that he was not responsible for impregnating Cheryl, as a woman performed the procedure. Cheryl reveals that she would not have been impregnated by the donor sperm regardless, because the day after she went to Berg, she discovered that David had already gotten her pregnant with Matthew.

Cheryl also reveals that her file likely isn’t missing at Berg. She used Rachel’s name in her dealings with them so that David didn’t find out she was pursuing a sperm donor, which means the donor must have known Cheryl used Rachel’s name at the clinic. Rachel puts two and two together and realizes that Hayden is the one who interfered with the procedure, donating his sperm so Rachel would get pregnant with his child and they could get back together. Hayden became dangerously obsessed with Rachel and thought that the donor procedure was successful. Believing that Cheryl, not Rachel, then gave birth to his biological son after receiving his donor sperm, he sought to get him back, with deadly consequences.

What Happens to Everyone in the End?

Rachel receives some missing photos from the Six Flags shoot on the day Matthew was spotted there, proving that Hayden was with him. We find out that Hayden was definitely the one who kidnapped Matthew the night he was “murdered,” believing he was his son, and has been raising Matthew as his own ever since, renaming him Theo. Hayden’s wealthy mother helped cover up the crime, but she discovered that Matthew wasn’t Hayden’s biological child and kept this knowledge from him, understanding his dangerous obsession with Rachel and wanting Hayden to believe that he did the “right” thing and didn’t just kidnap a random child who had nothing to do with him.

Rachel uses the knowledge that Hayden is obsessed with her to manipulate him, arriving at his mother’s sprawling estate before he can escape with Matthew. David and Sarah Greer, a member of the FBI’s Fugitive Task Force, also arrive at Gertrude’s estate, and they ambush Hayden, who explains that he tried to forget about Matthew, but once he’d seen him at Rachel’s family’s Fourth of July party, he couldn’t let it go. He tries to defend using little orphan Martin to get away with the crime, saying he would have died anyway, but Rachel tries to convince Hayden that he’s simply not well.

Rachel then tells Hayden the truth: that Matthew isn’t his biological son and that his mother lied to him about the DNA results. Hayden flies into a rage, killing his mother, shooting David, and trying to leave with Matthew. David, Rachel, and Sarah stop him, with Sarah eventually shooting Hayden dead in front of Matthew.

David’s conviction is overturned, and he is reunited with Matthew, who is confused but trying to become part of the family again. Rachel writes a book about David and Matthew; Cheryl has a new baby with her second husband, Ronald; Adam becomes a private investigator after losing his job as a police officer for helping David escape from prison; and Sarah becomes the head of the Boston Fugitive Task Force. The entire family reunite at David’s father’s funeral, with David assuring us that no matter what happens, he’ll always find his way back to Matthew.

All episodes of I Will Find You are streaming on Netflix now.