Page 90 of Run Rabbit Run

That's the worst part.

For a few minutes I'm just a woman doing the work she loves, and the work is good, and the light is perfect, and the man who caught me on this ground is a warm presence at my back instead of the reason I'll never leave it.

Then the sun's up, and the shot's done, and I lower the camera and remember, and the remembering is quieter than it used to be.

I film the north ridge with Ezra out of frame behind me, and the footage is good, and I hate how good it is.

We build the comeback slowly, the two of us, the way he builds everything.

A woman who went off-grid for a private year, who came back changed, softer, with a story she won't tell and a man beside her she will.

The internet does exactly what he said it would. They love it.

Four hundred thousand became six hundred thousand while I was gone, all of them mourning me a little, and now they weep with joy to have me back, and they flood the comments with hearts, and not one of them sees the leash in every frame, because the leash is the man holding the camera when I let him.

The man whose land every shot is filmed on, the man I go home to because there is no other home and never will be.

Rue's name is gone from the accounts.

We have dinner most nights now, the two of us, at the long table in the room with the tall windows.

That's the part I could never have explained to the woman I was, the sheer ordinariness of it.

He asks about the day's footage. I tell him.

He knows wine and pours it and tells me about the vineyard the way he told me about my own river once, and I've stopped flinching when he knows things.

He's a good conversationalist, when he wants to be.

Funny, even, in a dry cold way.

If you dropped a stranger into that dining room they'd see a handsome man and a woman who loves him, easy together in the candlelight, and they'd be right about half of it, and the wrong half is the half no one can see.

Some nights I catch myself laughing at something he's said before I remember I'm not supposed to be able to laugh anymore.

Those nights are the worst, and they're also, God forgive me, not always bad, and the fact that they're not always bad is the deepest wound he's given me, deeper than the pit, because a wound you can't feel anymore isn't healing.

It's just gone numb.

And then there's Rue.

Her name is gone from the accounts. I noticed the first time I logged in, from the new phone, with Ezra's numbers in it and Ezra watching.

The editor credit that used to read her name reads a management company now, one of his, and I understood in that moment that she's really gone, that whatever thread still ran between us got cut somewhere in the winter while I was learning to breathe underwater.

I don't ask about her. Asking is dangerous.

Asking is the old language, and the old language gets people hurt, and the last thing I have left to give the people I love is my silence, so I give it, the way I've given everything.

But some nights, when Ezra's asleep and the house is dark and the door is unlocked because it's always unlocked now, I lie awake and I let myself think her name.

Rue.

I hope she's okay. I hope she stopped looking.

I hope she grieved me clean and moved on and found a life that doesn't have a Wren-shaped hole in the middle of it, and I hope, most of all and most selfishly, that she never learns the truth, because the truth would do to her what it did to me, and one of us broken is enough.

She'll think I chose this.