Page 80 of Run Rabbit Run

The morning I woke up and reached for the light through the tall window and felt something almost like ease before I remembered to feel anything else.

The house is quiet the way it's always quiet, and I move through it now like water finding its level.

I take my coffee in the morning room where the east light comes in.

I know which stair creaks and I've stopped marking it as an escape route and started using it the way you use the sounds of a house you live in.

Delia doesn't lower her eyes anymore when she brings the trays, because I've stopped being someone she has to grieve and started being a woman who lives here.

The change in her is its own hushed proof of the change in me.

I don't listen for a signal that isn't coming.

I don't map the exits.

I did those things for a long time, the way you keep flexing a hand after the cast comes off, and then one gray week I noticed I'd stopped.

Noticing didn't even frighten me, and the not-being-frightened is the deepest thing he's done to me, deeper than the woods, deeper than the pit.

Somewhere in these countless days I stopped fighting the current and started living in the water.

I still find her sometimes, the woman on the riverbank.

Late, mostly, in the last of the light, when the trees go black against the sky and something in me remembers what it was to move through wilderness like that and belong to no one.

She's faint now.

A voice at the bottom of a well.

She calls up the old words sometimes, run, plan, fight, you are the most dangerous animal in these woods, and I stand at the window and listen to her the way you listen to a song you loved as a child, with a tenderness that isn't the same as wanting to go back.

I can't go back.

There's no back to go to.

He made certain of that, patiently, a hundred yards at a time, until the only road left led here, to this house, to him.

And the terrible truth, the one I've stopped fighting because fighting it was the final thing exhausting me, is that some days it doesn't feel like a cage anymore.

Some days it feels like the only warm room in a cold world, and the man who built it is the only warmth in it.

I've stopped being able to tell the difference between the walls that keep me in and the walls that keep everything else out.

He comes to me that night.

I hear him in the corridor, and my body does what it's learned to do.

This is the piece of it that would break the woman I was, if she were awake to see.

I'm not afraid when the door opens.

Some nights now, God help me, I've been waiting for it.

The door opens, and Ezra stands in the frame, firelight catching the dark sweep of his hair, those pale blue eyes finding me in the warm dark.

He doesn't need to lock me in anymore.

He knows I'll be here.