Page 52 of Run Rabbit Run

My hands are steady.

Gramps taught me that, steady hands when it counts, and for once the lesson holds without turning to ash in my mouth.

This is mine, this plan is mine, he didn't build it, and he can't have watched me make it.

Delia crosses to the table. The door swings shut behind her but doesn't latch.

I move.

Fast and silent, out from behind the door and past her before she's set the tray down, and she makes a small sound, not a scream, more like grief, and I hit the corridor door with both hands, and it gives, and I'm through it, into the dark beyond, running.

For a matter of seconds I'm free.

I'll remember it the rest of my life, those few seconds, the closest I came.

A stone corridor, colder than my rooms, lit by nothing, and I run it blind with one hand on the wall.

There's a stair at the end, down, and I take it three at a time, and there's a landing and a hall and a tall window at the end of it going gray with the last of the day, and past the window is the lawn and past the lawn is the tree line and I’m going to reach it, I’m going to⁠—

Something splits open in me as I run, huge and painful and alive.

It takes me a stride to understand it's hope, that traitor, back again, the same hope that killed me at the gap in the ridges.

I don't care.

I let it burn through me because it's the first time in seven days I've felt anything that isn't fear or shame.

I’d rather die running toward that window than live one more day going soft in his warm bright room.

He's at the bottom of the stairs.

He isn't rushing. He isn't even standing like a man braced to catch someone.

He's just there, at the foot of the last flight, hands in his pockets, looking up at me with those pale eyes like he's been waiting on this landing since the day I was born.

I stop so hard I nearly go down. My hand catches the rail.

The hope goes out of me all at once, a candle pinched between two fingers, and the dark that rushes in behind it is worse than any dark in the corridor.

"Delia leaves the door unlatched when her hands are full," he says, conversational, like we're discussing the weather. "I know. I taught her to. I wanted you to have something to find."

The words go through me colder than the corridor.

He wanted me to find it.

The unlatched door, the four counted seconds, the whole proud plan I thought was mine.

He left it there like bait in a snare.

I walked the corridor to it and called it my own idea, exactly the way I called going low my own idea.

Exactly the way I've called everything my own idea right up until the second he shows me the string tied to it.

My eyes burn.

I press my lips together hard, and I stare at a point on the wall past his shoulder, and I refuse, I fucking refuse, to let the first tear fall in front of him.

Because that's a door too, my crying, another thing he'd gather up and use, and the one lesson I've truly learned in seven days is that everything I give him he keeps.