Page 21 of Run Rabbit Run

The moment I could let her carry the other end, plan it with me, be the one person in the world who knows exactly where I am and what's happening to me and when.

Bring your friend into it, and I'll call the game forfeit and collect where you stand, and she'll have been the reason.

His voice, low and certain in the middle of my best friend's kitchen-warm loyalty.

He knew. Of course he knew.

He knew before I did that the first thing I'd want to do was hand this to Rue, and so he closed that door before I ever reached it.

He closed it using her, using how much I love her.

If I bring her in, he collects. And she'll have been the reason.

So I do the hardest thing I've done since I put my grandfather in the ground.

I look my best friend in the eye, and I lie.

"I hear you," I say. "I'm not deciding anything alone. I promise."

The lie tastes like a penny in my mouth.

Rue's shoulders come down an inch, relief loosening her, because she trusts me, because in twenty-five years I’ve never once given her a reason not to.

That's what he took from me in the parking lot, and I didn't even feel it go.

Twenty-five years of being the one person who never lied to Rue Bell.

We came up in the same house, ate off the same chipped plates, cried into the same secondhand quilts the winter Gramps couldn't afford to run the heat past nine at night.

When her mother's rights got signed away in that county office, I was the one who sat with her on the porch steps while she shook, and I told her she wasn't trash somebody set out at the curb, she was a girl our Gramps chose, and she believed me because I was the one saying it.

I’ve been her true north her whole life, and mine.

And a man I met an hour ago reached into that and turned it into a leash, and he did it without raising his voice, and the worst part is how easy I'm making it for him.

"Okay," she breathes. "Okay. Good. So what do we do?"

We.

She said we, and I have to sit here and build out the next ten days with a we in it for her to hold, while I quietly take every strand and route it around her so that when the trap closes, it closes on me alone.

"I need to train," I tell her, and that part's true, at least. "If I'm doing his game, I do it to win. Ten days to be at my best. That's what I need from you—keep everything running like any other week. The accounts, the schedule, all of it. If it looks like something's wrong, that's a problem I don't need."

"I can do normal." She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, rallying, because giving her a job is the kindest thing I can do for her, and I know it. "Boring and fine and business as usual. Normal is my thing."

Already my head's moving out ahead of me, into the work, the way it always does.

Ten days.

I know what ten days can build and what it can't.

I can't add muscle or wind that isn't already there, but I've got both from a life of hauling gear up grades most people won't hike empty-handed.

What I can do is sharpen my abilities.

Run terrain in the dark until my feet learn to see. Dial the bow back in. Get my body used to being cold and wet and moving anyway, because his woods will be all three and I'll be in them from sundown to dawn.

His woods. I don't know them.