Page 93 of Run Rabbit Run

She asks it every year.

The same question she asked me at her truck the morning before I ran, the same question she asked at a gate she doesn't remember standing at, the animal in her that never quite settled asking the only question that matters, across all the years and all my lies.

"I'd tell you," I say.

And she believes me, because I've never given her a reason not to, because the lie is old, worn smooth, and fits my mouth like something I was born saying.

She climbs into the truck.

The old engine turns over.

She waves through the windshield, grinning, my sister, my last thread to a world I can't remember wanting, and she drives back down the mountain believing with everything in her that she leaves me happy.

Maybe she does.

That's the part I can't answer anymore.

I stand on the gravel with the cold October morning around me and I watch the red truck go down through the trees the way I watched it once before, from a locked window with my fists bloody on the glass, screaming a name she couldn't hear.

I don't scream now.

There's no glass.

There's no lock.

There hasn't been for years.

I just stand in the open air I'm free to walk into and never do, and I watch my last door drive away smiling.

I rest both hands on the child growing inside me, the third one, another root sunk deep into this ground, another reason the woods will never be mine again.

The taillights wink out at the tree line.

The mountain goes quiet.

And I turn, on my own two feet, with no one making me, and walk back up the steps into the house that keeps what it catches, because it's warm in there, and my children are in there, and the man who owns all of us is in there, and there is nowhere else left in the world I know how to go.

* * *

Ezra

She comes up the steps with her hand on our child and the last of her friend's dust settling on the road below.

I watch her from the window of my study the way I've watched her for years now, except there's no hunt left in the watching.

There's only this.

The having.

The long slow reward I promised myself.

Four years married.

Two children asleep in the east wing that used to be her cell, a third on the way, and a wife who walks back into my house every single time the door stands open, because I taught her there's nowhere else.

She's mine.

Every part of her I memorized through a screen for over a year, every part I ran to ground in my woods, every part I broke and kept and married and filled with my children.