Page 43 of Run Rabbit Run

The gap in the ridges, the only way through.

The low country that stopped having snares because it didn't need snares, because it was all one snare, because every drainage on this mountain drains to this throat and every animal that runs the low ground ends up here, at dawn, believing, right where I am now.

He didn't lose my trail. There was never a trail to lose.

He herded me. All night.

Every clever choice I made, going low, running like a stranger, following the water—he built the whole low area to make me choose it, and I did, proud of myself, thinking I was writing my own line when I was reading his.

Even the water. Even that. I followed the creeks because I told myself water was what he couldn't corrupt, the honest guide underneath everything he'd bought, and he knew I'd think that, because I've said it on camera a dozen times, water tells the truth, water always runs true.

So he let the water tell the truth. He just made sure the truth it told led here.

And the look back.

The look back was the worst of it.

He gave me the gap, the dawn, and the empty drainage behind me so I'd feel it, the winning, the wild hot certainty of it, so I'd turn back toward the light with my whole chest full of joy and run the last blind stride straight into the ground he opened for me.

There was no move I could have made.

That's what sits coldest, hanging here in the ruins of my own cleverness.

Not that I lost.

That I was never once, in ten days or six hours, anywhere but exactly where he wanted me.

The winning was the bait. The hope was the hook.

And I swallowed all of it, grateful, thinking it was mine.

He didn't want to catch me tired and hopeless.

He wanted to catch me happy.

The cruelty of it goes through me slowly, the size of it, and it's worse than anything he could have done with his hands.

He let me have the dawn.

He let me have the empty drainage and the wild sweet certainty that I'd won.

He built a whole night, ten whole days, a year of watching, all of it aimed at manufacturing one perfect second of hope in me so he could be the one to take it away, because a woman who never hoped doesn't break, and breaking me was always the point.

I get my hands into the net and I pull, and it gives and holds, gives and holds.

I climb it a foot toward the light, and the walls of the pit are sheer wet earth with nothing to grab, and the net's anchored somewhere I can't reach, and I know, the way I've known which way a deer will break my whole life, that there's no getting out of this hole on my own.

It wasn't built to let me.

I stop climbing.

I hang in the net in the gray dawn light with my heart slamming and my breath sawing, the smell of turned earth and crushed fern all around me.

I take stock the way Gramps taught me to when the crossing goes bad in the middle.

No one knows where I am. I made sure of that myself, with my own mouth, in a diner and a parking lot and Rue's arms.

No one is coming. I built that too, brick by brick, ten days of it.