In 28 Weeks Later (2007), Don Harris tells his children he watched their mother die and couldn’t save her. He’d actually escaped while Alice was still alive, leaving her behind during an attack by the Infected.
The opening gives Don, played by Robert Carlyle, very little time to choose. He’s sheltering with Alice and other survivors in a rural cottage when they admit a terrified boy who’s been pursued by the Infected. Their refuge is soon overrun.
Don fights with a crowbar and urges Alice to leave the boy so they can escape together. She stays with him.
Don eventually loses his weapon, climbs through a window and flees across the fields to a boat. Alice pounds on a window as he leaves.
There’s a survival argument for running: he’d already fought back, he was now unarmed, and staying offered little chance of saving her. Their children, Tammy and Andy, were out of the country. Don’s escape meant they still had a surviving parent.
The story he tells them afterward is a separate choice. He claims to have witnessed a death he never saw, giving Tammy and Andy a version in which their mother’s fate was certain and his own actions were unavoidable.
Alice survived. She’s an asymptomatic carrier of the Rage Virus, and when Don later kisses her, he becomes infected. The parent who escaped the opening attack goes on to restart the outbreak.
