Page 71 of Run Rabbit Run

I watch her need it the same way Luke needs it, because the alternative is unbearable, because the truth is something no one who loves me can afford to look at straight.

Her shoulders come down the rest of the way.

She nods.

She nods, and wipes her face with the back of her hand, and I know that gesture too.

That's Rue letting go of a fear, that's Rue deciding it's going to be all right, and every nod is a nail and I feel each one go in.

Look up. Please. One time.

Look up at the house and see me at the window and know.

She doesn't look up.

She turns back toward her truck.

Ezra walks her to the door of it, solicitous, a perfect host, and he says something that makes her almost smile.

She climbs in, and the old engine turns over, and the red truck with the dent I put in it swings around in the gravel and starts back down the mountain.

I watch it go.

I watch it all the way down, my hands numb on the glass, my throat wrecked, my face wet, until the trees take it and it's gone, and the road is empty.

The fog closes over the place where my last door out of this house just drove away believing I was fine.

She came. She came all the way up my mountain to save me.

And she left believing I didn't need saving, because I'm the one who taught her that, because I built the lie so well it held even with me screaming at the window a hundred feet over her head.

I slide down the glass to the floor.

I don't cry anymore. I'm past crying.

I sit on the cold floor under the window with my ruined hands in my lap and I feel the last of it go out of me, the part that was still keeping watch, still mapping exits, still telling itself that somebody out there would notice, would come, would find the crack in his perfect house and pull me out of it.

Nobody's coming.

I knew it before. I've known it since the pit.

But knowing it in your head and watching it drive back down the mountain in your best friend's truck are two different kinds of knowing, and only one of them reaches all the way down.

I think about all the nights I lay in the dark walking Rue's ordinary day, using her like a lifeline, telling myself that as long as she was out there living free and worried and looking for me, some thread still connected me to the world I came from.

That thread snapped just now, in a gravel lot, and I watched it go.

She looked for me, and she found the answer he wanted her to find, and now she'll go home and grieve me slowly, the way you grieve someone who drifted off rather than someone who was taken, and she'll never know the difference.

The not-knowing will be its own small mercy for her and its own private hell for me.

She'll be okay.

That's the one clean truth left in the wreckage.

He wanted her gone, not hurt, and I gave her a story good enough to send her home safe, and she'll live.

She'll cry over me and post something soft and eventually stop checking the phone for a text that won't come, and she'll live, a hundred miles south, unharmed, because I disappeared correctly.