Page 75 of Run Rabbit Run

I've turned the last clean part of me into another wall of the cage, and I did it myself, tonight, without him even asking, because somewhere in these gray countless days I stopped fighting the water and started learning to breathe underneath it.

I should stop.

Some far, faint voice in me says stop, sit up, thrash, panic, do anything but this, don't use him for this, don't turn Gramps into a lock on your own door.

But stopping means fighting, and fighting means panic, and panic means drowning, and I'm so tired of drowning.

Gramps taught me that too. The ones who fight the water are the ones the water takes.

So I don't stop.

I keep breathing slow. I keep my heart obedient.

I let the current have me, and I hate myself with the last clean part of me even as that part goes still and pliant with the rest.

Ezra feels the change in me, the deep true stillness of it, and it pulls loose something in him I've never seen come free before.

"There," he breathes, and his voice isn't steady, not all the way, not this time. "There. Do you feel that? That's not me making you. That's you, finally. That's you deciding to stop drowning."

He's wrong. He's right.

I can't tell anymore, and not being able to tell is the last wall coming down.

He finishes with his forehead pressed to mine, and it's the closest to tender he's ever been, and I lie under him afterward with my breath still slow, still steady, still perfectly controlled the way a dead man taught me.

He stays there a moment, breathing me in, and then he moves off and settles beside me and pulls me back against his chest.

I let him, and my body fits into the curve of his like it's learned him by heart in the dark.

I stare up at the cabin ceiling and I go looking, one more time, for the part of me that would’ve fought this.

I look for her the way I looked for the laugh.

Back along the trail of myself, back through the gray countless days, past the window and Rue's truck, past the first night he came to me, past the pit and the hunt and the gate that clanged shut behind the car.

Back to a woman on a riverbank with a bow in her hand who believed she was the most dangerous animal in any woods she walked into.

She's back there.

I can still find the edges of her.

But she's gone faint the way a trail goes faint in old snow, the prints softening, filling in, until you can't say for sure a person came this way at all.

She'd have died before she used Gramps to lie still for this man.

I know that about her the way I know my own name, or knew it, back when my name meant a free woman.

She'd have chosen drowning.

She'd have fought the current till it took her under, because some things are worth drowning for.

Her freedom was one of them, and she'd have said so with her last breath of river water.

I didn't choose drowning.

I chose the slow breath and the obedient heart and the surviving, because that's what he built me back down to, one gray day at a time, until survival was the only instinct I had left and survival, it turns out, will make you do anything.

Will make you lie still.