Page 22 of Run Rabbit Run

That's the piece that sits wrong no matter how I turn it.

Every advantage I've got comes from knowing my ground, and he's taking me to his, land his family has held for generations, land he offered me like it was a gift.

The caves, the north ridge, the high country, use it well.

He wants me to use it. That alone should tell me not to.

Gramps' voice, dry as summer creekbed.

When a man hands you the map to his own house, Wrennie, it's because he's already moved everything worth taking.

I let the thought settle, and then I fold it away to work on later, because Rue's watching me go somewhere she can't follow, and I need to come back and be her normal for a few more minutes.

I make myself smile.

We sit a while longer, because leaving too fast would tell her more than my words did.

Rue talks logistics, the calendar and the queued posts and which brand deadlines fall inside the next ten days.

I nod and answer and let her build the scaffolding of a normal she can stand on.

Every helpful word out of her is a small knife.

She thinks she's helping me hold the world up.

She doesn't know she's arranging the furniture in a house I've already agreed to burn down with me inside it.

When we finally step out, the rain's gone soft, more mist than fall, and the gravel lot is empty of everything but her truck and my dead one waiting on a transmission I'm no longer sure was an accident.

Rue stops me at the driver's door. Her hand on my arm.

"Hey." She looks at me for a long moment, and something in her is still turning over the morning, still not quite settled by all my careful nothing. "You'd tell me. Right? If it was worse than you're saying. If you were in real trouble, the kind you can't handle on your own." Her voice thins. "You wouldn't disappear into it and make me watch from the outside. You'd tell me."

And there it is, the exact question, the biggest thing she's afraid of.

She's afraid of it because some animal part of her already knows the answer and is begging me to make it wrong.

I could tell her now. Even after everything, even after the lie in the booth.

I could say his name and the word forfeit and let her decide it with me.

And she'll have been the reason.

"I'd tell you," I say.

Another lie.

They come easier each time, and that's the worst of it, how fast the mouth learns to do what the heart is screaming against.

Rue searches my face for another second. Then she nods and pulls me into a hug that lasts a moment too long, fierce and hard, her chin hooked over my shoulder the way it's fit there since we were kids.

I hold my best friend in a wet parking lot and memorize her without letting her feel me do it.

"Ten days," she says into my hair. "Then this is over, and we laugh about it."

"Ten days," I agree.

One of us is right about what's waiting at the end of them.