When Kai gets the call that his father is dead, he is in Auckland, in bed with the man his family still does not know about.

By morning, he is driving back to Hawke's Bay, back to the house he spent years trying to escape, and back to the siblings who survived that childhood in completely different ways.

Maia has built a careful life far from the father she refused to let near her son. Tama stayed behind, carrying the weight of the house, the drinking, the silences, and the man no one else could bear to live with. Kai left and never properly came back.

Now Mo is dead, the tangihanga has begun, and the old house is waiting for them all.

At first, the return is practical. Funeral arrangements. Family obligations. Cupboards to clear. Boxes to sort. Rooms that still smell like damp carpet, old oil, and everything they thought they had outgrown.

But the house has kept more than memories.

Photographs, old papers, missing pieces of family history, and a long-buried truth begin to unsettle what Kai, Maia, and Tama thought they knew about their father, their mother, their uncle Jake, and themselves. As grief turns into confrontation, the siblings are forced to face not only what happened in that house, but what each of them had to become in order to survive it.

For Kai, returning home means confronting the father who shaped him, the brother who stayed, the sister who escaped, and the possibility that the story of his life was built around a lie.

For Maia, it means deciding whether the past has any right to touch the future she has made for her son.

For Tama, it means facing the terrible cost of loyalty to a man who could never love him properly.

Set between Auckland and rural Hawke's Bay, The House at the End of the Drive is a New Zealand family drama about siblings, grief, silence, buried truth, and the hard work of deciding what home means after the person who ruled it is gone.