Page 17 of Run Rabbit Run

What came after. The half-second where the woodswoman in her stood up inside the girl and started counting exits.

That's the moment I've waited four hundred and eleven days to watch in person, and it did not disappoint me, and I’m not a man who’s easily left undisappointed.

"She's not what her brother sold her as," Grady says from the front. He doesn't turn his head. He's the only man alive I permit to speak to me unasked, and he uses the privilege sparingly, which is why I permit it. "He made her sound like a mark. She's not a mark."

"No."

"Marks don't set terms." A pause, the wipers keeping time. "She gave the other woman a fifteen-minute window and a green light. That was for us, not for the friend. She wanted us to know she'd thought about what happens if she doesn't walk back in."

"I know what she wanted us to know." I watch the tree line thicken as the farmland gives way to timber, the country going darker and wetter and more mine with every mile. "It's why I'm going to enjoy this."

Grady says nothing to that. Grady’s been with me twelve years now, and there are corners of what I am that he's decided not to hold a candle to, and this is one of them.

I don't blame him for it. A man should keep some rooms in himself dark even from the people he trusts. Especially from them.

He wants to ask why her. I can feel the question sitting behind his teeth, the way it's sat there for the better part of a year, since the first time I told him to pull everything the internet held on a woman he'd never heard of.

He's too disciplined to ask it. But he wonders.

Thousands of women point cameras at themselves in the wilderness and call it a living, and I've watched enough of them to know what sets her apart, and what sets Wren apart is what nobody else who follows her has ever seen, because they're not looking for it and I am.

There's a video, early, badly shot.

She's field-dressing a deer she's taken clean at forty yards, and she's talking to the camera the whole time, easy, warm, a little funny, and then for one frame her hands are inside the animal and her face goes somewhere the warmth can't follow.

Somewhere cold and still and entirely without flinch. It lasts less than a second before the brightness comes back over it like water closing over a stone, and I’d bet everything I own that she doesn't know the camera caught it.

I'd bet more that no one who's ever watched that video saw what I saw.

She thinks she's a warm woman with a hard skill.

She's wrong. She's something cold wearing warmth like a coat, and she's spent her whole life keeping the coat buttoned, and she doesn't even know she's doing it.

That's why her. Not because she's beautiful, though she is. Not because she runs well, though she does. Because underneath the good-natured girl who teaches strangers to survive is a creature that looks exactly like me, and I’ve never in my life met another one, and I’m not going to spend the rest of it wondering what she'd have been if I'd left her in her woods.

I'm going to take the coat off her one button at a time, and show her what's been underneath the whole while, and she’s going to hate me for it right up until she doesn't.

I take out my phone.

There's no photograph of her on it, nothing so crude, nothing a careless hand could find.

What I keep is quieter than a photograph. I keep the account. The one that has watched every frame of footage she's ever put into the world, from the first shaky video shot on a cracked phone six years ago to the one that dropped this morning while she stood in my parking lot learning what she is to me.

I open it now.

People imagine surveillance as something loud. Vans and long lenses and men in parked cars.

It's a failure of imagination. The truth is that people surveil themselves now, thoroughly and for free, and hand the record to anyone patient enough to read it.

Wren has told me along with her other viewers, across six years of footage, how she thinks under pressure and where she goes when she's tired and which of her own instincts she trusts too much.

I know the sound of her real laugh and the different, brighter one she performs for a sponsor.

I can spot the exact set of her shoulders in the half-second before she decides to do something reckless.

The account is only the front door. There are quieter rooms.

A man on the staff at the veterans' clinic two counties over, who has never met me and never will, who is paid through four intermediaries to tell a market-research firm that doesn't exist which of his patients wake screaming and what they wake screaming about.