The Milk Run to Cassity's Reach - A found-family space opera about the cargo you never open, the crew you didn't plan for, and the one question a captain spent fifteen years refusing to ask

He's flown the same route for fifteen years and never once asked what's inside the crates. Tonight, one of them asks him back. Captain Idris Kalu has exactly one rule, and it's kept him alive for fifteen years: fly the route, deliver the cargo, and never, under any circumstances, ask what's sealed inside. It's a simple rule. It's worked every single time. Then a stowaway turns up in his hold at oh-four-hundred with a knife in her hand and a claim that one of those crates belongs to her - and Idris has to decide, in the space of a single night, whether the one rule that's kept his ship running, his crew safe, and his own past exactly where he buried it is worth protecting anymore, or whether it was never protecting him at all.
The closer his crew gets to the truth sealed inside that crate, the clearer it becomes that someone out there has been tracking this exact ship, this exact route, for a very long time - and that whatever they're chasing is not the girl standing in Idris's cargo hold, but the thing he's spent fifteen years refusing to let himself remember. Every port they dock in brings them one step closer to an answer Idris isn't sure he's ready to survive. What happens when the past you buried on purpose turns out to have never stopped looking for you?