Page 77 of Run Rabbit Run

I didn't have to teach her that.

She found it on her own, down at the bottom of herself where the will to live is stronger than pride or fury or even hate.

It's the finest thing she's ever done, and she'll never forgive herself for it.

She'll do it again tomorrow, and the day after, because now she knows how.

That's how it finishes.

Not with a scream.

With a woman quietly teaching herself to endure you, and hating it, and doing it anyway, until the enduring wears a groove so deep it stops feeling like enduring and starts feeling like her life.

I've watched it happen before, twice, on this mountain, to women who ran and lost.

Neither of them was her.

Neither of them reached back across a grave for the one person who loved them and used that love as a leash.

Neither of them broke this beautifully, this completely, this much like a mirror of the exact way I broke, once, a long time ago, in a house with a different monster in it.

I mean to leave the comparison there, the way I leave everything from that house, filed and sealed and never opened.

But it doesn't stay where I put it tonight.

Because I know precisely what she felt, reaching for the dead man in my bed.

I felt it too, at her age, younger, reaching for a mother who was already too broken to reach back, using the memory of her the way Wren used the memory of him, as something to hold onto while the water closed over.

I know the exact texture of that drowning.

I built everything I am on the far side of it.

And there's a thought I don't let finish, standing in her doorway, that says the reason I could break her this cleanly is that I knew the map from the inside.

That I didn't hunt a stranger.

I hunted myself, the soft version, the one that didn't make it, and I caught her.

Now I get to keep the part of me the world killed the first time.

I put the thought down. I'm good at putting things down.

But it leaves a residue tonight it hasn't left before, a faint unfamiliar weight I can't quite set anywhere, and I notice it, and I don't examine why.

She's sleeping now, back in the east wing, in the warm room with the fire I keep lit for her.

I stand in the doorway and watch her sleep, the way I've stood in this doorway a hundred nights, except tonight what I'm watching has changed.

The first weeks she slept like a hunted animal, coiled, ready, a body braced against the dark even in unconsciousness.

Tonight she's uncoiled.

Her hands are open.

Her breath comes slowly and evenly, the controlled rhythm she taught herself in the cabin, carried now into sleep, a survival skill gone so deep it runs without her.

She's breathing for me even while she dreams.