Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Once I Had a Love
By Mads Lennon
Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Mary becomes desperate for answers.
Mary is the only remaining person in her family that believes Therese is still alive. She’s in a loveless marriage with her husband Saul (Charles Esten), who desperately wants to be able to grieve his daughter but is struggling to do so when his wife refuses to move on despite seven years having passed since Therese disappeared.
Their son, Jake (Elliot Fletcher), also wants Mary to start moving on, so he stages a therapeutic intervention with his dad to get Mary to see reason. It doesn’t work. All Mary cares about is finding her daughter. She remains convinced that Emma and Kit kidnapped Therese and are holding her captive somewhere.
The problem is, she has no way of proving it. Even though Kit is in jail, it doesn’t sound like he was ever convicted of kidnapping Therese or that the cops ever made a connection between them. Mary thinks otherwise. She created an entire trust and organization to help find missing girls, all in honor of Therese. But it’s not because her daughter went missing, it’s because she was taken, she says.
One day at the office, Mary and Jake meet with convicted serial rapist John Tyler (Hamish Linklater). He’s done his time in prison and is supposedly doing everything in his power to rehabilitate himself. John is eager to join Mary’s team because he can give them the perspective straight from the predator himself. He can help her find the safety “gaps,” to give young women more tips to protect themselves. Mary isn’t interested in that. She doesn’t want to bring the literal bogeyman into her business, especially since John is the very type of man they’re trying to protect their girls from.
The one thing John has to offer her — insight into why predators pick their victims — he’s not willing to give. But then Kit kills himself and Mary loses her sole connection to Therese. The only option she has left now is tracking down Emma and the only way she can do that is with John’s help. So, Mary turns up at his apartment and blackmails him into searching for Emma by whatever means necessary.
And it turns out Mary might be onto something after all. In the final moments of Tell Me Your Secrets Episode 1, we see a flashback where Therese met Emma for the first time to get her haircut. Did Emma kidnap girls for her boyfriend?