Page 51 of Run Rabbit Run

I've timed her to the minute, because a person who comes on a schedule is a crack in a house built to have none.

The days themselves are the worst part, and not for any reason I can point at.

He doesn't hurt me. That's what I can't explain to the part of me that keeps waiting to be hurt.

After the woods, after the moss, I braced for a week of it, and instead I get warmth, food, and books.

And a man who comes in the evenings and sits and talks to me like I'm a guest who hasn't decided to leave.

He asks about Gramps.

He asks what the river was like, the one I filmed, and when I won't answer, he tells me about it himself.

The flow rate and the fish runs, and the year the spring flood took the old footbridge, and it takes me two full days to understand he's not guessing.

He knows my river.

He's studied the water I grew up on the way he studied everything.

Hearing my grandfather's river in this stranger's mouth is a violation with no bruise to show for it.

There's no word for that kind of theft, so I have nowhere to put the rage, and it sits in me, turning.

That's what breaks a person about a cage with no bars you can grip.

There's nothing to fight.

Fighting needs an edge, a wall, a lock you can throw yourself against, and he's taken all of them away and left me warm and fed and slowly, quietly, coming loose at every joint.

I catch myself listening for his footsteps in the evenings.

Not with dread.

With something worse, something like the ugly relief of a dog that's been alone in the dark too long.

Every time I catch it I want to claw it out of myself, because it's been a week and I can already feel the animal in me starting to choose the warmth of a human voice over the memory of what that human did to me in the woods.

That's why I have to run.

Not because I think I'll make it.

Because if I don't try, if I sit in this warm room one more day and let the softening happen, there won't be enough of me left to try later.

Tonight, I make my move.

I've been ready for two days.

I palmed a butter knife off a tray and worked the edge against the stone until it had something like a point.

I've watched the corridor door long enough to know Delia doesn't lock it behind herself when she carries a tray in both hands, because you can't.

Your hands are full, and for the length of time it takes her to cross to the table and set the tray down, that door stands unlocked at my back.

Four seconds. Maybe five. I've counted it a dozen times through the gap.

When she comes, I'm behind the bathroom door.

My heart's going so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and my skin's gone tight and alive the way it does before a shot.