Page 4 of Run Rabbit Run

Another's gone dark on an invoice from August and getting slippery about the difference between late and never.

A third mailed over a contract with a morality clause so long and so nervous it reads like they expect me to rob a bank on a livestream.

This is a job.

I built it from nothing, out of the one thing I've ever owned free and clear—knowing how to walk into the country like this and walk back out the far side with all my fingers.

I'm proud of it.

Most days I'm really fucking proud of it.

Some mornings it curdles a little, low in my gut, the fact that I've gone and monetized the only place that was ever mine, stapled a logo onto Gramps' river and called it a living.

Those mornings I don't look at it head-on.

Gramps would've had something to say about it.

He'd have turned one of my sponsored broadheads over in those big cracked hands, squinted at the packaging, and asked me why anybody needs a razor blade shipped in a plastic clamshell the size of a dinner plate.

Then he'd have kept it, because he never once threw away anything that could still cut.

He raised us on that river and the hundred miles of ridge and hollow behind it, me and Luke and Rue.

All three of us, because our mothers were busy losing to the drugs that were beating them, and somebody had to teach us which mushrooms wouldn't kill us.

He taught us to read water.

To read weather, and animals, and the hush a forest drops into right before something big moves through it.

He taught us that being scared was fine, was smart even, but that panic was a separate animal, and it would drown you faster than any river.

He's been gone for four years now, and the ridge feels emptier than it has any right to, and I still drive an hour and a half up a logging road to stand in his water because it's the closest thing to sitting with him I've got left.

I don't put that part in the videos.

Some things you keep to yourself.

"Coffee." Rue's up now, collapsing the tripod legs with quick, practiced snaps. "You've officially earned the bad coffee. And then I need you to look at something and tell me I'm being a lunatic."

The tone under the words turns me all the way around to face her.

"What kinda something?"

"Good something. Numbers something." She's already picking her way back toward the truck, breaking down gear as she goes, and I fall in beside her because tearing down a set with Rue is older muscle memory than the brand, older than almost anything left of who I used to be. "Your engagement's up. Way up. Last three weeks straight."

"Okay. That's good."

"That's great. Buy me something shiny." She swings the camera bag up into the bed. "But."

"But?"

She turns to face me, and the light's coming gray and low through the trunks now, catching the small crease that digs in between her brows when something won't sit right in her head.

"There's a viewer. One account. And it's watched everything, Wren."

"Everybody rewatches. That's the algorithm working."

"No. Everything, everything." Her hand cuts flat through the air. "Every video you've ever posted. All the way back to the potato-quality stuff from year one that I have literally begged you to take down. Beginning to end, all of it, over and over. The watch-time number's so high it broke the little graph."