Page 11 of Run Rabbit Run

Not a question. He says my name the way you'd pick up a stone you already knew the weight of.

"I don't know you."

"No." A small motion of his mouth that a generous person would call a smile. "But you will."

Every animal instinct Gramps ever drilled into me is standing up straight and showing its teeth, and I make myself sit still, because you don't run from a predator until you've measured the ground, and there's no ground to measure yet.

Only a name and a pair of eyes and my brother shaking beside me.

"Luke." I don't look away from Vane. "What did you do?"

It comes out of him in pieces.

The gambling I already knew about, the sickness I thought we'd buried two years back with the ninety-day chip and the tears and the promise.

It didn't stay buried. It moved.

Online at first, then rooms, then a room in the city where a man could get a marker if the house liked his face, and Luke has always had a face people like.

I listen and do what I've done my whole life, the reflex Gramps never could break me of because he was the one who put it there.

I go looking for the fix. Before Luke's even finished I'm three moves down the road, sorting what can be sold and what can be borrowed against and who I can call, running the numbers the way I'd run a route down an unfamiliar slope, looking for the line that gets us both to the bottom alive.

Then he says the number.

It doesn't sound real.

It sounds like a phone number. Like something with an area code.

Not money a person could owe another person and still be sitting in a diner with the sun coming through the window and a plate of ruined biscuits going cold between us.

Every route I was building collapses at once.

There is no selling my way out of that number. There is no borrowing against it, no crawling out from under it over ten hard years of scrimping.

A figure like that doesn't have a bottom of the slope. It just has a cliff.

"How?" My voice has gone somewhere flat and far away, the place it goes when the shooting starts and the body takes the wheel and the fear waits politely in the back seat for later. "How does a person even⁠—"

"It compounds." Vane says it gently, like he's explaining weather to a child. "A little at a time, and then all at once. Your brother is a case study in all at once."

"I was gonna fix it." Luke's got tears standing in his eyes and I hate that they still move me, after everything, after every single time. "I had a plan, I had a night that was gonna clear the whole⁠—"

"You didn't have a plan." Vane doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. "You had a hole and a shovel and a great deal of enthusiasm."

I turn on my brother, and the fear in me has cooked down into something harder, the rage that's always waiting under the fear where Luke's concerned.

Twenty-two years of it.

The window at nine, the car at nineteen, and the hospital at twenty-one and now this, this thing so much bigger than all of them stacked together that I can't see the top of it.

"So pay him." The words come sharp. "Sell the truck, sell every last thing you own, declare bankruptcy, I don't care, that's what it's for, you take the hit and you crawl out and you never gamble another dollar as long as you⁠—"

"It doesn't work like that with me."

Vane pulls the empty chair out at last, and he sits, and the sitting is somehow worse than the standing, because now he's at eye level and settling in like a man with all afternoon.

"Bankruptcy is a conversation between your brother and a court," he says. "This isn't that. This is a conversation between your brother and me, and I don't answer to courts, and I don't accept trucks."