What He Didn't Do

            We open on a 16-year-old girl, Debbie, watching as police cars drive away.  Then she turns and goes back into her house where she and her mom get into a fight ‘How could you?  How could you!’  Fast forward, the young man, whose face we never see, is escorted by guards into a jail cell.

            Years later, though we don’t explicitly say that, we meet Debbie, now in her 30s.  She and her two children have just moved and are settling into their new home.  We see another family a few doors down, a gruff father, two daughters, very nice.  There’s a knock on the door.  The father opens the door and we meet Joseph, a nice-looking middle aged man who introduces himself as a sex-offender.  The family is notably non-plussed.  A little while later, back at Debbie’s house, one of her kids rounds a corner, to find Joseph standing in the foyer, looking distraught.  The kid approaches him and Joseph scoops the kid up.  Debbie gasps as she sees him, but only startled.  Then she asks him how it went and he shrugs.  Apparently Debbie and Joseph are married.  These are their kids.

            The couple acclimates with difficulty to this new neighborhood where he is treated like a monster and where people make assumptions that she must be mentally unstable.  We at some point learn that his conviction was for statutory rape of Debbie when he was 19 and she was 16, but that they kept in touch and got married as soon as he was out of jail.  The past keeps up with them thanks to the legal system and becomes an even bigger deal when one of the neighbor’s daughters goes missing.

            Joseph is the obvious suspect, but Debbie defends him vehemently.  Still, evidence stacks up that he must have done it, and even his family starts to get nervous.  Eventually he is taken into custody, and the responsibility falls on Debbie to solve the kidnapping in order to vindicate her husband.  She begins investigating neighboring families, who treat her with disdain until she begins playing the victim of her perverse husband.

            Eventually she realizes that the family of the missing girl is being very suspicious and figures out that the father has deliberately sequestered away his own daughter in order to incriminate Joseph and protect his own family.  The family violently fights back her attempts to expose the fraud, but she manages to force the truth to come out.  Joseph is released but he is permanently shaken.  In an effort to protect his family, who he believes doesn’t trust him, from having to deal with this kind of upset again, he disappears, leaving town.