Page 91 of Run Rabbit Run

That's the last gift I can give her, and the cruelest one to myself.

She'll think I went into the woods and chose to stay gone.

She'll never know I fought.

She'll never know about the pit, the net, or the fact I almost made it, or the window I screamed at while she stood a hundred yards below.

She'll believe a soft sad story about a friend who drifted away, and she'll never know the real one.

That's the mercy, that's the reason I traded myself in the first place, that's the one part of all of this I managed to do right.

I kept her out of it.

Even now. Even like this. I kept her safe.

I fall asleep some nights holding onto that, the single clean truth in the wreck of me, and in the morning I get up and I take the east light in the morning room and I film the beautiful woods that caught me and I come home to the man who owns me.

And the mountain turns green, then gold and bare, and the seasons go around, and somewhere in the going I stop counting even the seasons.

There's just the life now.

The warm house and the long leash I hold for him, the camera and the country and the man in the doorway.

A wren is a small brown bird that lives in thickets and moves through cover like it was born knowing how to disappear.

I think about that sometimes, at the window, in the last of the light, when the ghost at the bottom of the well stirs enough to remember it.

My grandfather picked the name.

He told me once he chose it because a wren is little and plain and tougher than anything twice its size, a bird that survives the winters that kill the pretty ones.

He wanted me to survive. That was all he ever wanted for me, and he built me to do it, and I did.

I survived. That's the joke of it, the one only I will ever hear.

I survived so well I'm still alive in a cage a freer woman would have died to stay out of.

What lives here now is quieter, and it's learned to call the cage a home, and on the good days it can't remember hungering for anything else.

Most days now are good days.

That's the worst thing I know how to say about what he's made of me.

Most days now are good.

EPILOGUE

Wren

Rue comes for Halloween, the way she does now, every year.

Four years of it.

Four Halloweens since the one I don't talk about, since the night I ran his woods and lost and started the long slow business of becoming this.

She doesn't know that's the anniversary.

She thinks she's coming for the party, the big Vane estate party Ezra throws now, the one half the county angles for an invitation to, and she's half right.