Summary
The ending of Harlan Coben’s Run Away answers the few remaining big questions, but can’t resist an extra twist or two for good measure.
Thanks to a relatively revelatory penultimate episode, Harlan Coben’s Run Away doesn’t have a great deal to do in its finale. Episode 8, “It Stays With Us”, only has one big question to answer, which is who killed Aaron Corval. But of course, it isn’t content to do just that, and includes a bunch of late reveals that leave the season’s ending with a note of ambiguity. However, everything else is resolved pretty neatly, which is more than you can say for most Netflix shows.
I hope you’ve been reading all of these recaps, since a lot of what’s going on here loops back to things that might not have been mentioned for several episodes. It’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll do my best to keep it all simple and coherent. So, without further ado, here we go.
The Police Raid the Shining Haven
Simon, despite having been shot, manages to get a message through the responding officers to Isaac. Rocco’s tip-off that Paige got a bus to Backmere, which is close to the Shining Haven, aka the headquarters of the Beacon of the Shining Truth, suggests that she might be there. And, as luck would have it, the police are in the process of raiding the place.
After clearing out the security and rounding up the civilians, Isaac finds a secret room which leads him directly to Caspar Vartage, who is intending to take his own life rather than go through the courts. He’s dying anyway, and is satisfied with having lived three decades of his life as a king, as well he might be. But Isaac isn’t letting him get away that easily, and disarms him of the deadly pill.
Outside, one of the women says a new girl arrived recently and has been kept in a shipping container the cult uses for “solitary confinement”. What a nice place! There is indeed a girl in there, but it isn’t Paige. Instead, it’s a girl named Eve, whose real name is Zara.
Mother Adiona’s Story
Isaac visits Simon at his hospital bedside to once again violate police protocol by telling him the ins and outs of the entire investigation. He tells him about Caspar and the various half-brothers finding each other through ancestry websites. He tells him that he suspects Ash and Dee Dee killed Aaron – which we, of course, know they didn’t – and that the mysterious woman from the balcony hasn’t been seen since, at least not by him.
Simon has seen her, though. Adiona visited him in the hospital before Isaac got there and shared with him her backstory, about how she sired two sons with Caspar, the second of which was sent away. She used an ancestry website to track him down. This was Nathan Braddrick, the man we saw her approach in the previous episode. She couldn’t allow her own son to be murdered, which is why she tried to interfere in Ash and Dee Dee’s mission.
This isn’t exactly redemption, though, since she plans to rebuild the Shining Truth somewhere else. One gets the sense that if her own son hadn’t been in jeopardy, she wouldn’t have minded a great deal about anyone else’s.
Paige Is Found
When Simon goes to visit Ingrid in the hospital, he finds Paige at her bedside. She has been in rehab the entire time and is nearly a month clean. She only left after hearing about what happened to her mother, and plans to get back as quickly as possible before she succumbs to temptation.
Paige explains to Simon that after finding Aaron’s body, she ran, hid, and then checked into a rehab that Ingrid had introduced her to (another family secret). Paige swore her to secrecy, since she didn’t want to let Simon down if she failed again. During her first sojourn at the facility, Aaron had found out where it was and injected her with smack while she was asleep. What a charmer.
Simon agrees to take Paige back to the rehab. Before she re-enters, though, she confesses to killing Aaron. Simon doesn’t believe her and asks her if she went to Ingrid after Aaron beat her. It turns out she did. When she returned to the flat, Aaron was already dead.
Ingrid Killed Aaron
Eventually, Ingrid wakes up. Simon, Cornelius, Isaac, Ruby, Maria, Lou, and Daisy all attend Elena’s funeral after her body was found by the lake. Paige comes out of rehab and moves back in with her family. All seems well.
But Simon can’t let sleeping dogs lie. Despite promising Paige that he wouldn’t, he asks Ingrid about killing Aaron, and she confesses. She used Jay as an alibi – just an alibi, she’s careful to point out – and slipped away from him through the back door of Busy Burritos. She killed Aaron in the manner of a gang killing she’d read about, and then left. Luther saw her go, which explains why he was so frightened of her when he saw her again at the end of Episode 1.
This doesn’t quite explain why Jay told the police that she had gone to his apartment after giving him the slip in Busy Burritos, but I think that’s just an oversight.
One Final Reveal
This isn’t quite it, though. The ending of Harlan Coben’s Run Away saves one final reveal for the very end. And this, again, involves Ingrid.
Simon asks Yvonne about the old photos of Ingrid’s modelling days. She points him in the right direction, but what he sees visibly shocks him. He goes home and talks to Paige, who’s in the garden playing the guitar. He mentions that there were two single mattresses in Aaron’s flat (how’s that for a kick-yourself clue?). What kind of teenage couple sleeps in separate beds?
A teenage couple who are brother and sister! Simon also reveals that he spoke to Doug, who said that while he was being attacked, his attacker was screaming, “Nobody hurts my sister”. Paige and Aaron weren’t a couple; they were half-siblings. Ingrid’s “old modelling photos” show her as a member of the Shining Truth. The One sired Aaron with her.
After leaving the cult, Ingrid went to rehab – the same facility she ultimately took Paige to. But what this means is that Ingrid isn’t just guilty of murder, she’s guilty of murdering her own son. Paige swears Simon to secrecy. Living up to the title of the finale, “It Stays With Us”, Simon and Paige agree to keep the secret.
