The sun was setting when the group returned to the gates of Alexandria. The dust from the road stuck to their clothes like a ghost of ash. Their steps were heavy, not just from the long journey, but from the silence that hung over the survivors.

Daryl was standing at the eastern gate, his back resting against the rusty wall, a cigarette between his fingers, its ashes falling without him noticing. His eyes were scanning the horizon with the old habit — waiting for danger before it arrives. But today, something else caught his attention.

The group that was approaching had four people, but only two of them stopped him. The woman walking at the front — the way she held her head high as if challenging the world, her hair blowing in the sweat on her forehead — sparked something in his memory. He didn’t know her name, but his body remembered before his mind did. His back muscles tightened, and his right hand pressed the cigarette until it went out.

Next to her was the boy — a tall, skinny teenager, carrying a bag bigger than him, his eyes scanning the place with cautious curiosity. Something in the way he stood, the slight bend in his left shoulder as if protecting himself from an invisible blow, made Daryl hold his breath without realizing it.

The group stopped at the gate, and the woman raised her hand to greet the guard. Her voice reached him muffled by the wind, but he didn’t hear the words. All he saw was the boy suddenly turning toward Daryl, as if he felt the weight of his stare.

The eyes that met his were cold blue — the color of Georgia’s winter sky, a color that Merle always joked about: “Your eyes make people think you have feelings, man.”

Daryl stood still. In his mind, pieces of a puzzle began to slowly come together, painfully. The woman whose name he couldn’t remember, the boy with the eyes, the timing — it was all coming back from just before the outbreak, that summer when he ran from Merle, from the drugs, from everything… And for the first time in his life, he found something worth staying for.

But as usual, he destroyed it.

The memory hit him like a bullet: that night in a rundown apartment, her crying while he cursed himself, knowing he didn’t deserve her. Then the woods, months later, when he came back to find she had disappeared — he searched for her for days before giving up. Then, the outbreak became his excuse to forget everything.

And now, there she was, standing in front of him, with the boy who — if he counted the years on his fingers — should be…

Daryl felt nauseous. The boy looked at him again, this time with curiosity behind his caution. “Does he know me?” Daryl wondered in shock. “Did she tell him about me?”

The group began to move inside, and the woman grabbed the boy’s hand to pull him with her. At that moment, Daryl saw something that made him shiver: the silver chain around the boy’s wrist — an old pendant with a faded engraving of a falcon. He knew that falcon. He had stolen it from a jewelry store ten years ago and given it to her one drunken night, saying the words “I love you,” hoping he would remember them.

Now, he understood.

The boy was his son.

And the woman, whose name he couldn’t remember — the one who probably never told him this secret — had carried their child all these years while he ran from his past.

Daryl wanted to scream, to run after them, to ask a thousand questions… but his feet were glued to the ground. All he could do was watch them walk away, his hands trembling as if they were carrying the weight of all the mistakes that could never be fixed.