Page 12 of Run Rabbit Run

"Everybody answers to somebody."

"Do they?" He says it like he's honestly turning the notion over, a philosophy student humoring a freshman. "That's a comforting thing people tell each other. It helps them sleep. But you strike me as a woman who prefers the truth to the comfortable version, so here's the truth. The money your brother lost doesn't route through a bank or a casino or anyone who fills out a form. It routes through me. There's no institution between us for you to appeal to, no regulator, no judge. There's me, and there's what I'm owed, and there's the single method I've decided I'll take it in."

"And what's the method?"

He smiles again, and this time it reaches a little further up his face, and it's the most frightening thing I've seen in a life that's included an IED crater I filmed for a sponsor and a black bear at nine feet.

"That's the diner-parking-lot conversation," he says. "Not the vinyl-booth one."

Luke makes a small broken sound beside me. He knows.

Whatever's waiting in that parking lot, my brother already knows how bad it is, and he brought it to my table anyway.

I add it to the pile with all the other times, the pile that never stops growing where he's concerned.

"Then what do you accept?"

I shouldn't have asked. The second it's out of my mouth, I feel the ground I was looking for finally show itself under my feet, and it's not ground at all.

It's a trapdoor, and I've just stepped onto the seam of it.

He looks at me for a long moment. Not at my face, exactly. At all of me, unhurried, the way you'd read a topo map of wilderness you already own.

The look isn't the way men usually look at me. I've had every version of that over the years, in gyms, comment sections, and gas station parking lots, and I've got a response filed for each one.

This isn't any of them. He isn't undressing me. He's inventorying me, analyzing his reach and stride and the set of my jaw. There's no heat in it at all, which is somehow so much worse than if there were.

Heat I could work with. Heat makes men stupid.

Whatever this is, it hasn't made him stupid in a long, long time.

"Let's take a walk," Vane says. "The three of us. What comes next isn't for a room with witnesses in it."

"Anything you've got to say you can say right⁠—"

"Wren." Luke's hand closes over my wrist under the table, and it's shaking so hard it rattles my bones. "Please. Please just come outside. You don't want Marlene hearing this. You don't want any of them hearing this."

And that settles it, because he's right, and because some part of me already knows that whatever's waiting outside is a truth you don't say in front of witnesses.

I weigh it one more time, fast, the way you check your footing before you commit weight to it.

I could refuse. Stay in the booth, in the light, in the room full of people who've known me since I was in pigtails.

But he came here, to my town, on a Tuesday, with my brother in tow like a leashed dog, and a man doesn't do that unless he's already decided how it all ends.

Refusing to hear him won't change the ending. It'll only mean I walk into it blind.

Gramps' voice, quiet under everything.

You don't get to pick whether the storm comes, Wrennie. You only get to pick whether you're watching the sky when it does.

I look at Rue.

She's got her phone in her lap, screen lit, thumb hovering, and her eyes ask me the question without a word. Do I call someone? Do I call anyone? Say the word and I burn this place down.

I give my head the smallest shake.

Not yet. Not until I know what we're standing in.