David Kim lives in
San Jose, California with his daughter, Margot. His wife, Pamela, was diagnosed with
lymphoma and died before Margot entered high school. One night, Margot attempts to call David, but he is asleep. The following day, David is unable to contact Margot. Believing she is attending her piano lesson, David calls the instructor but is informed Margot cancelled her lessons six months prior. He discovers she pocketed and transferred $2,500 to a now-deleted
Venmo account. He calls the police, and the case is assigned to Detective Rosemary Vick. Through her social media accounts, David learns Margot has become a loner since Pamela's death. Vick reports Margot made a
fake ID and shows traffic camera footage of her car outside the city, suggesting she may have run away. Unconvinced, David discovers Margot had been using a
streaming site called YouCast, and befriended a young woman named Hannah. Vick reports Hannah's innocence, having been sighted in
Pittsburg at the time of the disappearance. From Margot's
Tumblr account, David notices she frequently visited Barbosa Lake near the highway where she was last seen. He finds her
Pokémon keychain there, and the police discover her car in the lake, containing an envelope with the $2,500. A search party is arranged, but a storm slows the process. After David has an altercation with a boy who claims to know where Margot is, Vick tells him he can no longer participate in the investigation. Undeterred, David visits
TMZ, which displays the crime scene photographs, and notices his brother Peter's jacket. He discovers text messages between Margot and Peter that suggest an
incestuous relationship. Upon confrontation, Peter explains they were only smoking
marijuana and confiding in each other. He chastises David for being negligent towards Margot, who is still grieving Pamela's death. Vick calls David and tells him an ex-convict named Randy Cartoff confessed to raping and killing Margot before committing
suicide. An empty-casket funeral is arranged for Margot. As David uploads photos to a funeral streaming site, he notices the website's
stock photograph features a picture of Hannah. Discovering she is a
stock model, he contacts her, and she reveals she does not know Margot and the police never called her. Talking to a police dispatcher, David learns Vick was not assigned to the case, but volunteered herself. He discovers she knew Cartoff through a volunteer program for ex-convicts. Reporting this to the sheriff, David confronts Vick, who is arrested at the funeral. Vick agrees to confess, in exchange for
leniency for her son, Robert. Having a crush on Margot, Robert used the YouCast account as Hannah to get close to her. Margot sent money to Robert's Venmo account, believing he was a working-class girl whose mother had cancer. Ashamed for lying, Robert wanted to return the money in person and followed her to Barbosa Lake to reveal himself. He surprised her by getting into her car, and she ran, with him accidentally pushing her off a cliff into a 50-foot-deep
ravine. Assuming the accident was fatal and could be perceived as
manslaughter or even
first-degree murder, Vick decided to cover up the incident, pushing the car into the lake and
fabricating the fake ID evidence to make it look like Margot ran away. After David found the car, Vick turned Cartoff into the
fall guy and staged his confession. Vick says that Margot is still in the ravine, suggesting that even if she had survived the fall, she could not have lived five days without water. David tells the police to return to the ravine, remembering the storm on the third day of the search, which could have provided her with water. The rescue crew finds Margot severely injured but alive. Two years later, Margot applies for college to major in piano. David tells her Pamela would have been proud of her. Margot changes her desktop picture from one of Pamela and her to the one David sent her of the two of them in the school hallway after the rescue, reflecting a closer relationship between them. ==Cast==