Page 40 of Run Rabbit Run

Behind me and above, faint through the timber, I hear her going down into the dark she chose.

Running, still. Good and hard and smart, running like someone else, exactly the way she promised herself she would.

I reach the high side of the throat before she's halfway down to it, and I find my place in the black lee of a boulder where the wind won't carry me.

I settle in to wait for the rabbit to come to the one gap in the mountain she has to run through.

From here I can hear her better than she'd believe.

The forest carries sound downhill to a man who knows how to sit still.

The rhythm of her stride gone ragged at the edges, the catch in her breathing on the steep pitches, the small involuntary sounds a body makes when it's been running for five hours and running scared.

I know that breathing. I've listened to a hundred hours of it through a screen, her narrating a climb, laughing between gasps, and it's the same breath now, stripped of the laughing, and hearing it live in my own dark woods is closer to intimate than anything I've let myself have in longer than I'll admit.

She's magnificent, going to pieces out there, and she doesn't even know I'm listening.

She'll reach it near dawn.

She'll see the gray coming up beyond it, open country, the edge of my land, freedom close enough to taste.

And she'll run for it with everything she has left, believing, all the way down, that she's about to win.

That's the moment I've built the whole night around.

Not the catching. Any fool with a net can catch a tired woman.

The believing. The half-second of pure, blazing, animal certainty that she's made it, right before the ground opens under her and takes it all away.

I've thought a great deal about what comes after. What I'll say to her, down in the pit, when she understands. Whether I'll let her scream herself hoarse first or reach for her while the fight's still hot in her, because both have their arguments and I've gone back and forth for weeks.

In the end I think I'll simply wait.

Sit at the edge of it in the gray dawn light and let her rage up at me and spend every last thing she has left, because a woman only has one first moment of knowing she belongs to you, and I don't intend to rush mine.

She won't understand yet, tonight, that the catching is where it begins and not where it ends.

They never do.

They think the trap is the worst of it.

The trap is the doorway.

What waits on the other side of it is the long slow winter of learning that every road left in her life runs through me, and I have all the patience in the world for teaching that lesson, because I've practiced patience since I was seventeen and I've never once run out.

I lean my head back against the cold stone, close my eyes, and I listen to her come.

She's close now. A half mile, maybe less, and coming faster than she should.

She's tiring.

The left-leaning tell will start to show soon, and it'll carry her toward the gap on the exact line I walked in the daylight.

Run, rabbit.

Run.

CHAPTER TWELVE