Emma has a collection of important papers that she keeps in a folder in her home. This paperwork symbolizes Emma’s secrets when she moves them to avoid Leo seeing them. He finds them anyway and discovers inconsistency in the facts about Emma’s life that she previously told him. One of these inconsistencies is a letter that suggests Emma did not graduate from St. Andrews University as she told him. A close look at a photograph of Emma’s graduation causes Leo to look up the colors of St. Andrews’s graduation robes and hoods, leading him to conclude she graduated elsewhere. Later, it will be revealed that Emma finished her degree at the Open University. Emma becomes so focused on the secrets these papers could reveal that she moves them on multiple occasions, eventually gathering all the most incriminating papers and placing them in her purse, allowing Leo to find them and discover she changed her name before they met. Without these papers, Leo might not have sought out Jeremy and learned the complete truth of Emma’s past.

While pregnant with her son, Charlie, Emma visits a small beach community in Northumberland with the prospective adoptive mother of her child. While walking on the beach, they come across the carcass of a crab not indigenous to the area, which appears to have evolved from a crab species common in Japan.