Page 70 of Run Rabbit Run

I look for anything to break the glass with.

The chair is too heavy and bolted-feeling and there's no time, there's no time, she's right there.

I hit the pane with the heel of my hand, with my elbow, with the flat of my forearm, throwing my weight against a window built to hold, and it doesn't crack.

It doesn't even flex, it just gives my body back to me bruised while my best friend stands in the gravel below not knowing I'm ten seconds and one sheet of old glass away.

This is what he meant by a comfortable prison.

Not one you can't hurt yourself against.

One where hurting yourself changes nothing, where you can throw everything you have at the way out and the way out doesn't even notice, until you learn, bone by bone, to stop throwing.

Down at the gate, Rue is talking to Grady.

I know exactly how she looks doing it, even from here, even too far to see her face.

The set of her shoulders.

The way she'll be leaning forward, earnest, the way she gets when she's worried and trying not to show it.

She's asking about me.

She drove a hundred miles up a stranger's mountain to ask a man at a gate about me, and I’m right the fuck here, right above her, and I can’t make her look up.

Grady talks. Rue talks.

It goes on for a while.

And then a second figure walks down from the house to join them, unhurried, dark against the gray gravel.

My stomach drops all the way out of me because I know that walk. I'd know it in my sleep. I hear it in my nightmares now.

Ezra.

He goes to my best friend at the gate, and I watch him do to her what he did to me in a diner two weeks and a lifetime ago.

The charm comes off him even from here, the warmth he can put on like a coat.

He takes Rue's hand in both of his, gentle, concerned, a good man reassuring a worried friend, and I watch her shoulders start to come down.

No.

No, Rue, don't believe him, don't you dare believe him, you know me, you've known me since we were nine, look up, look UP⁠—

I'm sobbing now, and the tears are hot and blinding. I scrub them away because I can't afford to lose sight of her.

I need to see, I need to witness this even though witnessing it is breaking something in me that won't set right again.

He's telling her the story.

The one I built.

The one I handed him with my own mouth.

Off-grid, coasting, some solo project up north, back before Thanksgiving.

He's telling it in his calm, reasonable voice with his hands around hers, and it fits so cleanly over the story she's been telling herself, the story I made sure she'd tell, that I watch her believe it in real time.