Page 7 of Run Rabbit Run

"We're in the truck. We just wrapped." I keep my voice level, the calmness I learned from a man who taught me you don't spook a scared animal by matching its fear. "Talk to me."

Rue's stopped talking.

She's got both hands on the wheel now and her eyes flick to me and then back to the road, reading my face out of the side of hers, and the crease is back between her brows.

"I need to see you," Luke says. "Today. Can I come by today?"

He doesn't come by.

That single fact starts a cold thread unspooling low in my belly.

Luke doesn't come by, hasn't come by in the year and a half since he moved two towns over for the fresh start, since the last chip and the last promise and the meetings he swore he was going to.

He calls on birthdays, texts memes late at night, shows up when he needs something and goes ghost the second he's got it. I've spent my whole life pretending that pattern doesn't cut the way it does.

But he doesn't drive an hour to sit across a table from me for no reason.

"Course you can come by," I say. "You okay? Just tell me if you're okay."

The pause is too long.

In that pause I can hear a road behind him, tires on wet asphalt, the thin whine of a car that needs a belt it isn't going to get.

"I'm okay," he says, and the lie is so bad, so bald, that neither of us bothers to pretend I believe it. "I'll be there by ten. Wren—" His voice does the high thing again. "Don't be mad at me. Okay? Before I even get there. Just try not to be mad."

The line goes dead before I can answer.

I sit there with the phone warm against my ear and nothing on the other end of it, and the town rolls up around us.

The gas station, the feed store, and the church with the sign that's said 'GOD IS STILL WORKING ON YOU' since the spring.

Don't be mad at me.

He's said that to me my whole life. Said it at nine with a broken window behind him and Gramps' truck coming up the drive. Said it at nineteen with a totaled car and a blood alcohol number the officer read off a clipboard. Said it at twenty-four in a hospital hallway that smelled like bleach, coming out of a fog I'd driven six hours through the night to sit beside.

Don't be mad at me is the sound my brother makes right before I find out how bad it really is.

And every time, I'm the one who pays for it.

That's what I don’t tell anyone else.

Not to Rue, not to Mama on the rare clear days, not to the therapist I saw four times before I decided I already knew what she was going to tell me. I've paid every single time, and I'd do it again, because the alternative is closing a door on the last of my blood that's worth loving, and I don't have it in me.

Gramps didn't raise a girl who leaves.

He raised a girl who goes back into the water after whoever's drowning, even when the whoever is the same fool who jumped in on purpose.

"Luke?" Rue asks, even though she knows. She heard enough.

"He's coming up. Says he'll be here by ten."

"Coming up here? From Kettner?" She signals for the diner lot and pulls in slowly, and she's chewing the inside of her cheek. I watch her arrive at the same place I've already gotten to. "He doesn't come up here."

"I know."

"Wren." She puts the truck in park and turns to face me full on, and there's no lightness left in her now. None of the coffee-shop teasing from the riverbank. "The last time Luke drove an hour to say something to your face, it was to tell you he'd pawned your grandfather's rifle."

The words go into me clean, no resistance, the way a blade does before the hurt catches up.