Run Away

Simon Greene, a Manhattan financial advisor, sits on a bench in Strawberry Fields, a memorial section of Central Park, and watches a gaunt street musician play for tips. The musician is his daughter Paige, now barely recognizable after years of drug addiction. Once a bright student who loved writing stories on park benches and starred in her school's production of Fiddler on the Roof, Paige was banned from the family home by Simon's wife, Ingrid, a pediatrician, after Paige stole cash and jewelry to fund her habit. Simon has been secretly searching for Paige for months, and a tip from a neighbor led him here.

When Simon approaches, Paige briefly recognizes him and begins to cry, but her boyfriend Aaron Corval, a thirty-two-year-old man Simon blames for her descent into addiction, intervenes and leads Paige away. Simon punches Aaron, breaking his nose, and is immediately tackled by bystanders who see a man in a tailored suit attacking someone who appears homeless. Tourists film the incident, and the video goes viral under titles like "PROSPERITY PUNCHES POVERTY" and "DADDY WARBUCKS DESTROYS THE DESTITUTE" (26). Simon is arrested and bailed out by veteran defense attorney Hester Crimstein. That evening, he confesses to Ingrid that he has been secretly searching for Paige. Ingrid insists she did not give up on their daughter out of coldness but because she believes only Paige can choose to save herself.

Three months later, Detective Isaac Fagbenle from Bronx Homicide arrives at Simon's office. Aaron Corval has been murdered, his throat nearly severed and his body mutilated. Paige is missing. Simon is briefly a suspect. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Elena Ramirez, a retired FBI agent now working as a private investigator, is hired by wealthy businessman Sebastian Thorpe III to find his adopted son Henry, who has been missing for three days. In a seemingly unrelated thread, a professional hit man known as Ash and his partner Dee Dee, who grew up together in the foster care system, carry out staged murders across the country: a father in Massachusetts made to look like a suicide, a tattoo parlor co-owner in New Jersey made to look like a robbery. Each killing uses different methods to prevent detection. Dee Dee belongs to a religious cult called the Shining Truth, based at a compound called Truth Haven near the Vermont border.

Simon and Ingrid travel to Aaron and Paige's apartment in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. Inside, they find two single mattresses on opposite sides of the room, dried blood, and Paige's folded clothes. A neighbor named Cornelius, the building's owner and a Marine veteran who befriended Paige, confirms that Aaron beat Paige and that she fled days before the murder. Cornelius directs them to a local drug dealer named Rocco. While Simon questions Rocco, one of Rocco's men, a young man named Luther, bursts in and opens fire. The bullet hits Ingrid. Cornelius shoots Luther to save them, and Ingrid is rushed to the hospital, where she falls into a coma.

Elena's investigation converges with Simon's when she traces communications between her missing client Henry Thorpe and someone using Paige's phone number and a laptop stolen from Simon's son Sam at Amherst College. They join forces. Simon attends Aaron's memorial at the Corval family's Connecticut inn, where Aaron's stepmother Enid reveals doubts about Aaron's origins: His father Wiley claimed Aaron's biological mother died in Italy, but his passports show he never traveled there. Wiley also reveals that Paige sought Aaron out, not the other way around.

Elena discovers that both Henry Thorpe and the murdered tattoo parlor owner, Damien Gorse, were adopted and had been using DNA ancestry websites. Simon finds a charge on Paige's credit card for a similar site called Ance-Story. Elena traces both adoptions to a small agency in Maine, where a former employee named Alison Mayflower handled secretive placements involving birth mothers from an orthodox religious group. At Lanford College, Paige's former roommate reveals that Paige became withdrawn after her first semester. A professor, Louis van de Beek, confirms Paige disclosed a sexual assault before going silent. Van de Beek also recalls that after a sophomore who had assaulted Paige was viciously beaten with a baseball bat, an older man began appearing outside Paige's classes. Simon realizes this was Aaron, whose violent act of retaliation helped him bond with and ultimately trap Paige.

Elena's tech associate hacks Henry Thorpe's DNA account and uncovers four half-siblings, all male, all sharing the same biological father: the cult leader Casper Vartage. Two are already dead, and Aaron Corval is almost certainly a third. Paige does not appear in the relative list, and a rush paternity test confirms Simon is her biological father. Someone is systematically killing these half-siblings. The full motive emerges: Vartage fathered at least fourteen sons within the cult, but to preserve the prophecy that only two designated heirs would inherit, the other babies were secretly sold through adoption. Mothers were told their sons died in childbirth or went to a nonexistent second compound. Now that DNA ancestry sites have enabled the scattered half-siblings to discover each other, Vartage's two recognized sons are having them killed to protect both a forty-million-dollar inheritance and the cult's mythology.

Dee Dee lures Elena to a remote cabin by posing as Alison Mayflower's partner. After Elena surrenders her phone and gun, Ash executes her. Using Elena's phone, Ash and Dee Dee impersonate her in texts to Simon, tracking his movements. At an apartment in the Bronx, the killers attack while Simon is meeting with Rocco and Luther, killing both men. Simon deliberately shields Cornelius with his own body, taking two bullets. Cornelius fires back and kills Ash. As Dee Dee leans out a window to finish Simon, Mother Adiona, a high-ranking cult member who followed the killers after learning her own biological son was on the target list, pushes Dee Dee out the window to her death.

One month later, Simon is recovering from surgery and Ingrid is slowly emerging from her coma. Vartage has died of natural causes, and his sons deny involvement. Simon returns from a fruitless trip to Buffalo to find Paige sitting at Ingrid's bedside, pale but clear-eyed and one month sober. The rehabilitation retreat she has been attending enforces total isolation for the first month. Paige reveals that Ingrid took her to this retreat before the Central Park incident, and it had been working until Aaron found her and injected her with drugs while she slept. Ingrid knew about the retreat because she had attended it herself years earlier. Paige explains she kept Simon in the dark because the disappointment on his face each time she relapsed was so devastating she feared it would drive her to end her own life.

On the drive back to the retreat, Simon presses Paige about Aaron's murder. Paige claims responsibility, but Simon sees through the lie and lays out his deduction: After Aaron beat her, Paige called Ingrid, who drove to the Bronx and killed Aaron, deliberately making the murder look like a drug-related hit. This also explains why Luther shot Ingrid at Rocco's: He had seen her at the scene and feared she was coming for him. Paige confirms everything and reveals that stumbling upon her mother in blood-soaked hospital scrubs was the catalyst that drove her to commit to recovery.

In the weeks that follow, Ingrid recovers and returns home, Paige enrolls at NYU, and the family begins to heal. But Simon visits the student Aaron attacked and learns that during the beating, Aaron screamed, "No one hurts my sister" (399). Simon reconstructs the devastating truth: When Paige took the DNA test at college, she discovered Aaron was her half-brother, not through Simon but through Ingrid. As a teenager, Ingrid fell in with Truth Haven, was impregnated by Vartage, and was told her baby was stillborn. The baby was sold through the adoption network and became Aaron Corval. Paige sought Aaron out as a newly discovered brother. Aaron, damaged by abuse, became violently protective but also hooked Paige on drugs, perhaps out of possessiveness and a desire for revenge against the mother he believed abandoned him. The two mattresses on opposite sides of their apartment now make sense: They were siblings, not lovers. Ingrid, in killing Aaron to save Paige, unknowingly murdered her own son.

One evening in Strawberry Fields, Ingrid confesses to Simon that she killed Aaron. Simon tells her he already knew and understands. During a family dinner with all five Greenes reunited, Simon watches Ingrid laugh and wrestles with whether to reveal the final truth. He resolves that there will be no more secrets between them, "Except this one" (403). He will carry the burden alone. Almost a year later, Elena's body is found, and Simon attends her funeral in Chicago, where she is buried beside her late partner, Joel Marcus.