Page 24 of Run Rabbit Run

I've done it on camera a hundred times. Narrated it. Taught strangers the geometry of how I think when I'm afraid.

And the whole time, a cold worm of a thought keeps turning over in the back of my head, one I can't kill no matter how hard I run.

If I've got a signature, he's already learned it.

A year of footage.

Every reckless climb, every ridge-line cutback, every time I looked into the lens and explained which way a scared woman breaks.

I built him a manual on how to catch me. I published it for free and called it teaching people to survive.

I shove the thought down and keep drilling, because the drills are all I've got, and a bad plan run hard beats a good plan you talk yourself out of.

The nights are for the phone.

Rue keeps the accounts breathing.

We spend the evenings the way we've spent a hundred work nights, her on her laptop and me on mine, except now every clip we shoot and queue is a small brick in the wall I'm building between the truth and everyone I love.

"Okay, this one goes live on the second," she says, dragging a thumbnail across her screen. "Then the knife-sharpening one on the fourth, then the shelter build on the seventh. That carries you through past Halloween easily, into the middle of November if we stretch it."

Past Halloween.

She says it lightly, like a scheduling problem, and it settles in me like a stone dropped down a well, because she doesn't know what she's saying.

She thinks she's covering for a woman who'll be off-grid ten days and back before Thanksgiving.

She's building the story a dead woman's brand will keep telling after the woman is gone.

I make myself nod and reach for another clip.

"Add the fire-starting one," I say. "The one from last winter we never posted. Space it out more. If the feed goes too quiet too fast, people notice. If it goes too regularly, that's worse—that's a woman being careful, and careful reads as scheduled, and scheduled reads as gone."

Rue's hands go still on the keyboard.

She looks at me across the blue glow, and I watch her almost ask it.

I watch the question rise up behind her eyes, the same one from the parking lot, why do you sound like you're planning to vanish?

I hold my face the way Gramps taught me to hold it over a card table when I was small, and he was teaching me to bluff for pennies.

Give the tell nowhere to live.

"You're really into this," she says finally, and it isn't quite the question, and I let her not-ask it because that's the kindest thing left that I can give her.

"I want it airtight," I say. "That's all. If I'm gone in the woods and my phone's dead, I don't want brands blowing up your inbox because I went dark. Handle it now, coast later."

It's a good lie because it almost sounds true.

That's what I'm learning about the good ones. They're not built out of nothing. They're built out of the truth with one load-bearing wall knocked out.

The structure looks solid right up until the day somebody leans on the wrong part.

Rue nods slowly and goes back to the schedule.

I go back to pretending this is about brand continuity, and we work another hour like that, two women who've loved each other since before we had adult teeth, sitting a foot apart and separated by a lie the size of the rest of my life.

Luke calls on the fifth afternoon, while I'm pulling arrows out of a target I've shot to ruin, and I almost don't answer.