Abhiroop Das
Helmed by Nimer Rashed and Isher Sahota, Netflix’s ‘Run Away‘ follows Simon Greene, a wealth manager who has been looking for his daughter for over six months. Along this journey, his story intersects with that of serial killers Ash and Dee Dee, as well as Elena Ravenscroft, a private investigator who has been digging into a trail of blood left behind by the duo. At the heart of the story, which is an adaptation of three interlinked narratives, is the gruesome murder of Aaron Corval, Paige’s boyfriend. Simon just so happens to be a major suspect in the investigation, but with his daughter still missing, he has more pressing concerns. Without warning, he is thrust into a multi-pronged battle, both evading police investigation and conducting one himself. However, with each clue unearthed in this mystery thriller series, adapted from Harlan Coben’s eponymous book, the answers only get more complex. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Run Away Plot Recap
‘Run Away’ begins with Simon Greene, a wealth manager with a seemingly perfect family life, except for one glaring problem: his daughter Paige hasn’t returned home for 6 months. While she seemingly ran away with her boyfriend, Aaron Colvar, Simon hasn’t stopped looking for her. Although he does eventually find her at a park, beat-up and playing her guitar for a living, things don’t go as planned. When Aaron interrupts him, Simon responds with a brutal beatdown, which ends up going viral on the internet. The biggest surprise, however, comes a few days later, when Aaron is found dead and mutilated in his apartment. Detectives Isaac Fagbenle and Ruby Todd believe Simon to be the culprit, but he has little time to worry about that, as his daughter’s whereabouts are still unknown.
Two other stories run in parallel with Simon’s quest for Paige. The first is that of an assassin duo, Ash and Dee Dee, who are out on a murder spree. Dee Dee, who is in a cult known as The Shining Truth, has been handed a kill list, which includes Aaron and Paige. Elsewhere, Elena Ravenscroft, a famous private investigator, has been tasked with locating another missing teen, Henry Thorpe. As Elena combs through his social media, she chances upon emails from none other than Paige, and those, among other details, lead her to the murder scenes left behind by Ash and Dee Dee, tying all three stories together. Around the same time, Simon and his wife, Ingrid, venture into a drug lord’s hideout to locate their daughter, but Ingrid is shot before any progress is made. While she is hospitalized, Elena contacts Simon, and they begin investigating together.
The pieces in the puzzle begin to come together when Elena discovers that Henry, as well as all the dead men, were orphans raised in the same orphanage. This includes Aaron, too, as Simon confirms that his parents lied about his birth. Things get intense when Simon discovers DNA test records in Paige’s banking history, and the possibility that she is not his biological child begins to eat at him. However, a paternity test proves otherwise, thus making Paige’s actions all the more confusing. Meanwhile, Elena ends up getting too close to the truth and is ambushed and killed by Ash and Dee Dee. As they try to track Aaron, not knowing that he is dead, they come across Simon and try to kill him instead. However, both the serial killers meet their end in the process, and an injured Simon is hospitalized, with the mysteries of his daughter and Aaron still unsolved.
Run Away Ending: Does Simon Find His Daughter?
At the end of ‘Run Away,’ Simon finds Paige at the hospital with Ingrid, but the circumstances behind this long-awaited reunion are far from what he expected. As Ingrid is still unconscious in this scene, it is possible that Paige intended this to be a quick check-up on her mother, before once again disappearing into the dark. However, Simon’s arrival makes every puzzle piece fall in place, and we get a complete breakdown of everything that has transpired in this short span of time. The most unexpected revelation here is that Paige didn’t exactly go missing, but was in rehab this entire time. She explains that she has been clean for almost a month, and her chance encounter with Simon at the start of the show is included around this timespan. The question, as such, is less about the where and more about why Paige kept quiet this entire time.
In yet another surprising development, Paige reveals that Ingrid was the first to bring Paige to rehab and had been vaguely in the know about her daughter’s life this entire time. Just as in the case of Paige’s sexual assault, the family decided to keep things secret from Simon. While the decision can come off as puzzling, it has much to do with Simon’s domineering nature, which has been on full display many times in the previous episodes. In line with her past conflicts with her father, Paige felt both afraid and ashamed of revealing her internal struggles to him, and found escape to be a better alternative. This completely flips the idea that Ingrid is responsible for her daughter leaving the house, as in reality, this is mostly about Simon’s shortcomings as a parent, having unintentional consequences.
While Paige had been clean for quite some time, things changed when she was ambushed by her father in episode one. Following this, she reinitiated contact with Aaron, who injected her with drugs while she was sleeping, breaking her streak. This was the final straw in her dynamic with Aaron, as the following day, she returned to the rehab center, where she spent the next month, away from the murder investigation. However, this didn’t mean that Paige cut off all contact from the outside world, as her brief visit to Sam also fits into the timeline. More importantly, she was there on the night of the murder. She had indeed come across Aaron’s dead body and even touched the knife. All of these details seemingly build up to a grim conclusion, one neither Simon nor Paige can ignore.
Who killed Aaron Corval?
‘Run Away’ ends by revealing Aaron Corval’s murderer to be none other than Ingrid. That is not the most chilling development, however, as Paige also reveals that Aaron was not actually her boyfriend, but her half-brother, and his mother is none other than Ingrid herself. While these two revelations completely flip the story upside down, there is plenty of foreshadowing that can be found throughout the story. First off, the most odd thing about Ingrid getting shot is how Luther appears to be focused on her as a target. In a later confession, he also expresses that he shot in self-defense, and with all the context at hand, these words make sense. As confirmed by a quick flashback, Luther saw Ingrid on the night she killed Aaron, and was likely paranoid since.
Initially, Paige tried to take the blame away from her mother by actively confessing to the crime. However, Simon’s growing curiosity about Ingrid’s actions on the fateful night meant that the truth couldn’t be kept from him for long. Paige at last confessed that she had nothing to do with the murder and merely chanced upon Aaron’s dead body. Not long after this confession, Ingrid wakes up from her coma, prompting Simon to directly get all the answers from the source. Ingrid fearlessly tells her husband the truth, that she had been planning Aaron’s death ever since Paige told her about his physical abuse. That night, she convinced Stanfield to become her alibi and then ventured into Aaron’s home alone. Once she had the chance, she likely spiked his drink before ultimately killing him.
While talking to Simon, she also confessed to framing the murder as a gang-related incident in order to evade suspicion. What this recounting of events leaves out, however, is the cruel irony behind it all. Simon only gets the full picture when he confronts Doug Mulzer, Paige’s assaulter, who explains that his attacker claimed to be her brother. With this, the detail about her genealogy test falls into place, as it was not done to check her parentage, but sibling relations. Ingrid, who had claimed to be a model abroad in her youth, is revealed to be a former member of The Shining Truth cult. Paige explains that Aaron also knew that he had many half-siblings across the country and possibly felt jealous of Paige leading a happy life with his mother, which prompted him to abuse his own sister.
Will Simon Tell Ingrid the Truth?
While Aaron was likely driven by a twisted sense of revenge in his actions against Paige, in reality, Ingrid never knew that her son was alive. Paige posits that the cult likely told Ingrid that her child died at birth, which is the same lie they have told many other mothers. This, in turn, might have been her breaking point, leading her to escape the cult and start afresh with Simon. However, the darker side to this idea is that Ingrid unknowingly killed her own son, and likely still believes him to be someone completely separate from herself. While Aaron has been a nefarious character from the start, it cannot be ignored that he is a result of decades of trauma, both physical and psychological. The fact that his own mother ends up murdering him is what makes his arc a true tragedy.
Ultimately, Simon is faced with the most crushing choice in the series thus far: whether or not to tell Ingrid the truth about Aaron. The show ends on an ambiguous note, but leans into the idea that Simon will keep things a secret to protect Ingrid from the psychological torment. This goes against the very grain of his dynamic with Ingrid, as just moments prior, he confronted her about Aaron’s murder upfront. Still, his secret is in the same vein as the many truths she kept from him, especially those concerning Paige. The ending, as such, highlights the gray nature of secrets and how they can make or break familial relationships. The show’s final scene is a visual testament to that dilemma, as Simon is at last having dinner with his entire family, but his expression is anything but happy, reflecting a deeply hidden turmoil.
Notably, whether or not Simon reveals the truth to Ingrid, the police investigation is likely not stopping anytime soon. There are two major clues at the police’s disposal that can get Ingrid behind bars. Firstly, Luther is still alive and has a good chance at revealing the truth to Fagbenle, which would instantly solve the case. Even without his complete confession, however, the police still have CCTV footage of Ingrid exiting a restaurant from the back door, seemingly to avoid suspicion. So far, Stanfield’s lie about him and Ingrid having an affair has redirected police attention away from this detail, but it is only a matter of time before Fagbenle and Todd put two and two together and reexamine the facts. Thus, the many truths surrounding Ingrid’s crime may come out into the open, regardless of what decision Simon makes.
What Happens to The Shining Truth Cult? Where is Henry Thorpe?
With Caspar Vartage, AKA The One, behind bars, The Shining Truth Cult is all but dissolved, bringing an end to what was potentially a decades-long criminal operation. While we aren’t shown any explicitly incriminatory revelations surrounding the cult, Todd discovering an imprisoned girl named Zara is likely the key to bringing down the entire network. It is only a matter of time before Ash and Dee Dee’s murder spree is connected to Vartage’s kill list, which should act as a final straw. Despite all initial indications connecting Paige to this cult, reality turned out to be quite different, as she was only partially involved in the chain of events that brought the cult to the center stage. Notably, Ingrid killing Aaron unintentionally saved Paige from certain death, as she and Aaron were also among the serial killers’ targets at one point.
Although The Shining Truth is brought down, one particular mystery remains in the story, that being Henry Thorpe’s disappearance. While Fagbenle and Todd track down Henry’s biological mother, it appears that they are too late in uncovering the cult’s murder plan. Henry’s complete absence in the final stretch of the narrative implies that he was most likely killed by Ash and Dee Dee around the same time that Damine and the others were killed. However, while Henry does appear in the duo’s list, his death is never mentioned by the news, nor discovered by Elena and Lou. Given that he specifically texted his father that he was going out with his friends, it is possible that he is still hiding with many of his half-siblings, who know that there is a killer duo hunting for them.
Even with Vartage arrested, The Shining Truth isn’t exactly out of the picture, as hinted at by Mother Adiona, one of the cult’s higher-ups. From the start, she appears to be the only one who is alarmed by the cult’s cruelty. Still, with the risk of death looming around, she has no choice but to keep up with the charade. This changes towards the latter half of the show, when we see her push Dee Dee to her death and save Simon’s life. Later, it is revealed that Adiona paid Simon another visit a few nights later, telling him that she plans to rebuild The Shining Truth from scratch, this time with more positive and non-violent values. As such, the cult appears to be in the process of a transformation, much like the rest of the characters in this tale, all of whom wish to leave their traumatic pasts behind.
Read More: Where is Netflix’s Run Away Filmed? All Shooting Locations
