It was supposed to be over.

The road, the running, the hunger that chased them across state lines. Lee and Maren had found something different now: a place to stop. A small apartment with creaky floors and too-thin walls, a toddler whose laughter filled the rooms like sunlight.

Days passed in rhythms they’d never thought they’d have. Pancakes on Saturday mornings. Walks to the park where Lee swung the little one up on his shoulders. Maren humming while folding laundry, keeping one ear open for the familiar patter of small feet.

For the first time, they weren’t just surviving. They were living.

But the past doesn’t disappear. It waits.

Sometimes, late at night, Lee would glance out the window a little too long, shoulders tense, jaw set like he was listening for footsteps. Sometimes Maren would dream of voices, of blood on the wind, and wake with her hand curled protectively around their child.

And then one evening — just as the three of them sat together on the floor, crayons and picture books scattered around — a shadow returned.

Sully.

Older, but unchanged where it mattered. His eyes still sharp, still knowing. He didn’t knock. Didn’t need to. He just stood there in the doorway, looking at what they’d built, at the life that was never supposed to be theirs.

Lee’s shoulders locked, his hand twitching like he might reach for something, anything. Maren shifted closer to their child, her body an instinctive shield. The child looked up, blinking at the stranger, too young to understand the weight in the room.

The apartment that had felt safe only moments ago suddenly felt too small, too fragile, too easy to break.

Sully smiled, slow, deliberate.

“You thought you could hide forever?”

The silence that followed carried every road they’d run, every choice they’d made, every ghost they thought they’d left behind.

The family they’d started was real. It was everything. But the past was back now. And it wasn’t letting go.