Page 72 of Run Rabbit Run

Because I did the one right thing left to me.

I kept her out of it, all the way to the end, even as it cost me the last hand that might have pulled me free.

I hold onto that. It's all I've got to hold.

The door opens behind me without a sound.

I don't turn around. I don't have to.

I feel the air change, go charged and close, and I stay where I am on the floor with my back to him and my face to the empty road.

"You had a visitor," Ezra says.

I say nothing.

"She was worried about you." He crosses the room, slowly, and I feel him stop behind me, feel him crouch, feel the warmth of him at my back. "She drove a long way. She loves you very much. I could see it." A pause. "I told her you were safe. It wasn't even a lie. You are safe. Safer than you've ever been in your entire life."

Still I say nothing, because there's nothing left in me to say it with.

"She won't come back," he says gently, almost kind, and that's the cruelest part, the kindness. "Not now. She has her answer, and it's the answer she wanted. People don't go looking for what they've decided is already found." His hand settles on my shoulder, and I don't shrug it off, and I hate that I don't. "You can stop waiting for her now, Wren. You can stop waiting for anyone. It's just us. It was always going to be just us."

And the terrible part, the one I'll never forgive myself for, is that some worn-out animal piece of me, sitting on the cold floor with the empty road in front of it and nowhere left to hope toward, leans back the smallest fraction into the warmth of his hand.

Because he's the only warmth left.

He made sure of it.

He drove the last of the cold away himself, a hundred yards down a gravel road, in a red truck with a dent in the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Wren

After Rue, something in me stops keeping score.

There's no day count anymore.

I lost it somewhere in the gray stretch after the red truck drove back down the mountain.

Losing it frightens me less than it should, because counting was one more way I stayed myself and staying myself has started to feel like carrying a stone uphill for no reason anyone can name.

He lets me out of the east wing now.

That's the newest turn of events.

After Rue, after I stopped throwing myself at windows, he began opening doors, a few at a time, the way you'd let a broken horse into a larger paddock once you're sure it's stopped trying the fence.

I have the run of part of the house.

I take meals at a table instead of off a tray.

Some afternoons, if the weather's clear and Grady walks a pace behind me, I'm allowed out onto the grounds.

The grounds. His grounds. The woods that caught me.

That's the cruelty I didn't see coming, that he'd give the outside back to me once he was sure it couldn't help me anymore, that he'd let me stand in the open air of his mountain and feel the size of how thoroughly it's his.

Freedom you can't use is a special kind of cage.