The Ending of Netflix's Profoundly Unsettling 'Secrets We Keep' Explained

I am hopelessly addicted to Scandi Noirs and other dark mystery series from across the Atlantic (not always the Harlan Coben series, although sometimes those, too). I know some subscribers only keep Netflix around for the big stuff — Stranger Things, Squid Game, or Wednesday — but I’m in it for the bleak limited series where the murder at the center is sometimes the least depressing thing going on.

That’s definitely the case with Secrets We Keep, the Danish series from Ingeborg Topsøe, and you know if you see a slashed O, things are about to get really messed up. Secrets We Keep (or Reservatet) follows Ruby Tan, a young Filipino au pair who goes missing.

Marie Bach Hansen plays Cecilie, a wealthy woman with her own au pair, Angel (Excel Busano), who looks after her infant and teenage son, Viggo (Lukas Zuperka), while Cecilie spends her days at a high-powered job, drinking wine with neighbors, going on long runs, and having aggressive sex with her husband, Mike, a well-to-do lawyer. They live in a beautiful glass house in the country, and Cecilie believes she’s a good employer because she’s polite, sets boundaries, and is invested in Ruby’s disappearance.

And she is, at least compared to her neighbors, Katarina (Danica Curcic) and Rasmus (Lars Ranthe), the kind of couple who treat their au pair with utter dismissiveness. In America, they’d be the ones calling the au pair “the help” and patting themselves on the back for letting her make a personal call during the day. They’re awful, and it’s their au pair, Ruby, who vanishes the morning after she comes to Cecilie for advice. Cecilie, not wanting to get involved, tells her to take it up with Katarina and Rasmus, and the next morning, Ruby is gone.

I’ll stop here for those avoiding spoilers and just say this is a must-watch if you’re into bleak Scandinavian mysteries filled with impossibly stern and attractive people wading through moral decay and murder. This one is especially rich, delving into class, privilege, gender divides, and the complexities of parenting.

Now back to the story: Spoilers: It’s Cecilie — rich but with a conscience — who drives the investigation in the first few days, eventually convincing Rasmus — wary of what a scandal might do to his reputation — to notify the police. Soon enough, she discovers that Ruby was pregnant when she disappeared. About midway through the series, she begins to suspect her husband, Mike (Simon Sears), who not only enjoys rough sex but also has a rape conviction from his youth, although he swears he’s changed.

However, when Ruby’s body is found floating in a body of water, Mike is quickly ruled out after a DNA test proves he wasn’t the father of Ruby’s unborn child. It’s unclear how Ruby died, though police initially rule it a suicide. Suspicion shifts to Rasmus, and Cecilie helps a detective, Aicha (Sara Fanta Traore), steer the investigation in his direction, causing major friction between the two families, who were close before Ruby’s disappearance.

Ruby’s death also forces Cecilie to see how au pairs are treated, though not that much, since she continues to patronize Angel and even judges her for leaving her own son behind in the Philippines to work in Denmark. Her son Viggo, however, is very attached to Angel — a little too attached for Cecilie’s comfort (Viggo, who’s around 14, often asks Angel to hold him as he falls asleep).

As the investigation deepens, we learn that Rasmus and Katarina’s son, Oscar (also 14), had been sharing naked videos of Ruby, captured on a nanny cam, with his friends. Worse, there’s footage of him raping Ruby, and DNA evidence later confirms that he impregnated her.

Open-and-shut case, right? There’s DNA evidence and video footage. Even after the footage is destroyed, Cecilie’s son, Viggo, has seen it and can testify. Oscar even confesses to Cecilie, saying Ruby had to do what he wanted because she was the family’s employee.

But these are wealthy, despicable people, and much to Cecilie’s horror, Mike agrees to represent Rasmus — after all, he’s his wealthiest client. They spin the narrative that Oscar was underage and that Ruby took advantage of him, which is why she took her own life. With the video footage destroyed, Mike convinces Cecilie it’s too risky to put Viggo on the stand, arguing he’d be eviscerated in cross-examination and it would traumatize him.

Reluctantly, Cecilie agrees, the case against Oscar collapses, and the police are forced to close the investigation. To make matters worse, Cecilie fires her au pair, Angel, claiming she wants to spend more time with her own son. She gives Angel a severance, a plane ticket back to the Philippines, and some extra cash in an attempt to absolve herself. But Angel nails it when she tells Cecilie, “Basically, I’m being fired because the neighbor kid raped my friend.”

In the final scene, Cecilie reluctantly agrees to have a drink with Katarina and Rasmus to smooth things over for the sake of her husband’s career and their standing in the neighborhood. During the conversation, Katarina hints that she killed Ruby to protect her son.

“We’re both good mothers,” Katarina says over what’s probably her fourth glass of wine. “But we’re very different kinds of mothers. For you, it’s important that kids clear the table after meals. For me, it’s important they learn how to fight.”

“Those men, they think everything sorts itself out,” she adds, all but confirming she “sorted” things herself. In other words, Katarina almost certainly murdered Ruby to protect her son from being held accountable for his crimes.

It’s deeply unsettling and profoundly upsetting. It’s what makes Secrets We Keep so damn good.