Page 86 of Run Rabbit Run

She moves through my house now like she was born to it.

She takes the east light in the morning room.

She's learned the creak in the third stair and stopped treating it like intelligence.

When I come to her at night she turns toward me before I've crossed the threshold, and there's no fight left to break, no wall left to take down, and a man who has spent his life taking down walls doesn't quite know what to do in a house with none left standing.

This is the part the stories never tell you.

They end at the catching.

The hunter gets what he hunted and the curtain comes down, and no one shows you the morning after.

When you're standing in a warm house with your prize gone soft and content in the next room, and the appetite that drove you for a year turns over in its sleep and asks, what now.

What now?

I've thought about it. I think about everything.

I won't keep her locked in the east wing forever.

That was always temporary, the acclimation, the breaking-in.

A hooded hawk isn't kept hooded once it's manned.

You take the hood off and it stays on the glove because the glove is where the food is, because you've made yourself its entire world.

It comes back to your fist across a mile of open sky because there's nowhere else it knows how to land.

That's what she'll be. Not a caged thing. A homed one. I'll give her the world back a piece at a time, the way I gave her the grounds.

A trip to the coast, watched. A phone with numbers I've chosen in it.

Eventually the work again, if she wants it, the cameras and the wilderness and the four hundred thousand strangers, because there's a pleasure I've been saving.

The pleasure of letting her go out into the world on a leash so long she can almost forget it's there, and watching her come home to me every time, on her own two feet, because home is what I've become instead of a place I keep her.

The ghost of her can even come back to life, if we're careful.

A comeback. A woman who took a long private year to heal from something she won't discuss, returned to her wild places, changed, softer, with a man beside her the internet will find devastating.

They'll love it.

They love a love story, and they'll never know the truth of the one they're looking at.

I can be patient about all of it. Patience is the only religion I've ever kept.

Grady finds me in the study, where I'm watching the last of her old footage with the sound off, out of habit more than need.

"The friend's gone quiet," he says. "Rue Bell. The calls stopped weeks back. The last video off the old schedule posted Tuesday, and there's nothing behind it. Account's gone dark."

"And the search?"

"There wasn't much of one to begin with. A missing-persons report the sister's brother talked her out of filing, once he confirmed the story. A few posts asking if anyone's heard from her." He shrugs, economical as ever. "It's fading. People assumed she meant to disappear. She's a woman who could. Lived off-grid, worked alone, made a brand of vanishing into the wilderness. The world's decided she vanished into it for real."

Exactly as I built it.

That's the finest work I've ever done, finer than the pit, finer than the hunt.