Page 9 of Run Rabbit Run

"I know."

"You don't, though." She says it gently, no heat in it, the way only someone who's watched you do it your whole life can say something hard. "You've been catching Luke since before your arms were long enough. You caught your mama. You caught me, and I was the easy one." A crooked half-smile. "One of these days you're going to have to let yourself be the one who gets caught."

I don't have an answer for that.

The truth is I wouldn't know how to fall if I tried. Gramps built me to be the steady one, the one who reads the water and calls the crossing, and it has never once fallen to me to be the person standing on the bank waiting to get pulled out.

Somebody has to see the whole room. Somebody has to know the out.

So I do what I always do when Rue gets too close to the soft middle of me.

I steal the burnt half of her biscuit and change the subject, and she lets me, because she loves me and because she knows the wall when she hits it.

Here's what I'd forget to tell you about Rue if you asked me to describe her.

Not that she's loyal, though she is, or sharp, though she's that too.

It's that she can hold a whole morning open with both hands and keep the dark out of it a little longer, just by being exactly who she is across a cracked vinyl table.

We were nine when Gramps took her in.

Her mama signed the papers in a county office with a pen chained to the desk, signed away every right she had and never looked back, and Gramps drove home with a third kid in the truck and never once made Rue feel like a number he'd added.

He just set another plate. Cut another switch for the walking stick collection by the door. Taught her the same water he taught Luke and me.

She's more my family than the woman who shares my blood ever managed to be, and she’s sitting across from me stealing the good half of my ruined biscuit, and the love comes up in me so hard and so sudden it stings the corners of my eyes.

I don't know yet that this is one of the last ordinary mornings.

What I can't see coming is the rest of it. That in a handful of days I'll be somewhere with no signal and no exit, playing this exact hour back behind my eyes like footage, trying to hold onto the weight of her hand on my wrist.

Right now she's just Rue, and the coffee's just coffee, and my brother's just late.

The clock over the counter reads five to ten when the bell on the door goes.

I feel him before I see him.

That old wiring, the part Gramps built, the piece of me that knows the set of my brother's shoulders in a doorway before my eyes have made the trip.

I look up.

Luke stands in the doorway of the diner, and he's thinner than the last time, and he's wearing a hoodie two seasons too light for the cold.

His eyes find mine across the room, fast and scared, the way a kid finds the one adult who might get him out of trouble.

But my brother isn't what stops my heart.

What does it, what drops the whole warm morning straight through the floor, is the man standing behind him.

I've never seen him before.

I'd remember.

He's tall in a way that fills the doorframe without trying, dark coat, dark eyes, a stillness on him that doesn't belong in a diner on a Tuesday morning, a stillness that doesn't belong anywhere people are living their lives.

He isn't looking at Luke.

He isn't looking at the room.