Page 62 of Run Rabbit Run

That's why he's lasted twelve years.

But I see him decide not to ask.

Let the friend come.

I've thought about this too, the way I think about everything, and I know precisely how it goes.

She drives up my mountain full of worry and love.

She meets the gate.

She meets Grady, and a story so close to the one she's already telling herself that turning around will feel like her own idea.

She'll leave believing. They always leave believing, when I want them to.

And Wren will never know her friend stood a quarter mile from her locked door and drove home again, because that knowledge is a wound I'm saving, to open later, on a night when opening it will do the most good.

That's the art of it. Small men spend their cruelty all at once, like boys with a fistful of coins.

I've never once been in a hurry.

I turn back to the screen.

The video's near its end, the dead woman crouched at a creek, filling a bottle, telling four hundred thousand people that water never lies to you on a mountain, that water always runs true.

I taught the living one differently, out in my dark, and the ghost doesn't know that yet, and neither does her audience. The joke of it is so private and so complete that I sit with it a while, alone, in the firelight.

Then I do what I've been circling all evening, the move I decided on this afternoon and have been saving like dessert.

I take out my phone and cue the video up fresh, the newest one, the one that dropped today.

And I carry it upstairs to show her.

She's spent nine days imagining the world going on without her, and imagining is a mercy, because imagining leaves room to hope she's wrong.

It's time to take the mercy away.

It's time she saw it with her own eyes, the smiling capable ghost of herself performing freedom for strangers, and understood, all the way down, that the woman she used to be is already gone, already replaced, already grieving nobody, and the only Wren with a future left is the one I'm making in my east wing.

A kinder man would let her keep the fantasy.

I've never wanted to be a kinder man.

I've only ever wanted to be the one holding the key, and tonight I want her to watch her old self smile at four hundred thousand strangers and know, past any hope, that I'm the only door her life opens onto now.

I climb the stairs with her own face glowing in my palm.

I've been patient for a long time.

Tonight I get to watch two Wrens meet.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Wren

He brings his phone into the room like an offering, and I know before he speaks that whatever's on it is going to hurt.

"I have something to show you," he says.