Page 61 of Run Rabbit Run

It doesn't move me the way a normal man would be moved.

I've watched enough normal men to know the difference.

A normal man would feel guilt watching that bright doomed girl perform freedom she'll never have again, and I feel nothing so useful as guilt.

What I feel is appetite.

The video is the before, and I am the after.

Holding both of them at once, the free ghost and the caught woman, is the closest I come to what other people mean when they say they're in love.

That should trouble me. It doesn't.

I stopped measuring myself against what should trouble a man a long time ago, in a house where the man who should have been troubled by anything never was. I decided if I was going to be a monster, I'd at least be an honest and patient one, which is more than my father ever managed.

The friend keeps the whole lie breathing, and she thinks she's keeping faith.

Rue Bell.

I've watched her for a year too, on the edges of Wren's frame, in the tagged posts and the shared accounts; the plainer woman behind the camera who runs the schedule and writes the captions and keeps it all turning.

She's the one queuing the dead woman's videos now, on the timetable Wren set before she came to me, believing every drop of it is her friend gone off-grid and coasting.

Every video Rue posts drives another nail into the story I built.

She's sealing Wren in with her own two hands and calling it loyalty, calling it holding down the fort, and she has no idea she's the most useful tool I own and the only one I never had to pay for.

But Rue is the one variable I keep my eye on, because loyalty and worry live in the same house.

Worry has a way of getting up in the night to check the locks.

Grady brings me the report at nine, the way he does.

"The friend's asking questions," he says, standing in the study door because he knows I don't like him past the threshold when I'm watching her. "Called the brother twice this week. Called Wren's number four times, straight to voicemail. She's not panicking. But she's counting the days, and the days are starting to not add up for her."

"What did the brother tell her?"

"What we fed him. That Wren checked in, that she's fine, that she's chasing some solo project up north and went dark on purpose." Grady's face doesn't change, but there's the smallest weight in how he says it. "He believes it. He's relieved to believe it. Easier than the alternative."

Of course he is.

That's the beauty of using Luke Holloway to hold the line.

I never had to threaten the boy or buy him.

I only had to hand him a story that lets him off the hook for what his sister traded to save him, and a man that desperate to be forgiven will swallow any lie that keeps the guilt at arm's length.

He tells Rue his sister's fine because he needs his sister to be fine, because the truth would mean he sold her, and Luke Holloway will believe the earth is flat before he believes that about himself.

So the alarm rings, and rings, and the one man who could confirm it keeps quietly turning it off.

"She'll come here eventually," I say. "The friend. Won't she?"

"That'd be my read." Grady watches me. "Worry like hers doesn't stay on the phone forever. Sooner or later she gets in the truck."

"Good."

He doesn't ask what I mean by good.