Page 68 of Run Rabbit Run

Gramps would take one look at where I am and know the way out, because he always knew the way out.

He’s been gone for four years, and I'm learning to lie still in a monster's arms, and there's no current left in me to swim against, even if I could find the bank.

It ran out. I just didn't feel it go.

I try until trying feels like grief, and then past that, into something with no name, and the harder I reach the further the sound recedes, the way a star goes out if you look straight at it.

The laugh is gone.

He took it, or I gave it, or the woman on the screen carried it off with her when she died, and it doesn't matter which because the end is the same either way.

I can't remember how I used to sound when I was free.

And the animal in me, warm against his chest, tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, has already stopped trying to.

That's the part that finally breaks something loose behind my eyes, there in the dark where he can't see it and it costs me nothing to let it fall.

Not that he took my freedom. Not even that he took the laugh.

It's that some piece of me has stopped fighting to get either one back, has started, without my permission, to settle into the warm life he's building for me.

I lie in his arms and grieve for a woman who isn't all the way dead yet, because I can still feel her in here, faint, getting fainter, and I don't know how to save her.

I'm so tired, and his hand is so gentle in my hair.

I stay awake long after his breathing goes deep and even.

Learning the sound of it, out of old habit, the way I learn everything.

Hating that even now, even broken, even grieving, some part of me is soothed by the rhythm of the monster breathing beside me in the dark.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Wren

Twelve days in, I see Rue's truck coming up the mountain.

I almost miss it.

I've stopped watching the window the way I did the first week, stopped mapping the drive, the tree line and the fog, because watching was hope and hope is a muscle he's been starving me on purpose.

Twelve days will do that.

Twelve days of the same warm room, the same locked door, and the same silent man arriving on his own schedule.

A person stops looking for the way out, not because she's decided there isn't one but because the looking hurts too much to keep up.

I've gone quiet inside in a way I don't have a word for.

Flat. Low.

A creek gone to ice, still moving somewhere underneath but no current you could feel from the bank.

That's what he's built in the twelve days I’ve been here.

Not agreement. Not surrender, not yet.

Just the slow draining-off the part of me that fought, until fighting feels like a language I used to speak and can't quite hear anymore.