Page 87 of Run Rabbit Run

I didn't just take her. I took her in a way the world helped me with, a way her own life set up for me, so that her disappearance reads as the natural end of the story she was already telling.

No crime. No victim.

A free spirit who went into the woods one day and chose not to come out, and a few hundred thousand people who'll feel a soft sad tug about it now and then and post an old clip on the anniversary and move on.

"The brother?" I ask.

"Quiet. Gambling's stopped, mostly. He thinks he's the reason she's gone. It's eating him." Grady pauses. "You want me to do anything about him?"

"No." I watch the silent woman on the screen draw a silent bow. "Let him handle the weight of it. He'll keep the story alive better out of guilt than I ever could out of threat. A man who thinks he sold his sister doesn't go looking too hard for proof he's right."

Grady nods and goes, and the door closes behind him, soft.

I sit a while longer in the firelight with the ghost moving on the screen and the real woman sleeping upstairs, both of them mine now, the free one and the caught one, the before and the after.

I close the laptop.

The hollow's still there, the strange stillness after a long hunt won.

But I'm learning already what fills it, and it isn't the memory of the chase.

It's the next phase of our story.

The long slow decades of keeping her.

Watching her forget, year by year, that she was ever anyone but the woman at my side.

Waiting for the day, and it will come.

I have the patience to wait for it, when she reaches for me not because the reaching was trained into her but because somewhere in all the reaching it stopped being training and became true.

That's the last hunt, the long one I'll spend the rest of my life on.

I go up through my dark and silent house to the warm room where she sleeps with the door unlocked, and I let myself in.

I lie down beside the woman I spent a year and a fortune and every patient hour I own to catch.

She turns in her sleep and fits herself against me.

Even now. Even sleeping.

She comes to my fist across the dark.

I don't smile. I've never been a man who smiles.

But I lie there in the warm dark holding what's finally, entirely mine, and for the first time in a very long life I have nothing left to want and nowhere left to hunt, and I find that the having, in the end, is enough.

It has to be.

I made certain there was nothing else left for either of us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Wren

Spring comes to the mountain, and Ezra gives me the coast.

A day trip, for the first time he lets me past the gate since the car brought me up it on Halloween.