Page 92 of Run Rabbit Run

Because there is a party, and it’s beautiful, and I’m the hostess of it in a dark green dress with my hand resting on the curve of my belly.

She doesn't know the date means anything.

Only Ezra and I know that.

Only I stand at the tall windows on the last night of October with something cold moving under my ribs that I can't explain to anyone, least of all myself, because the woman who could explain it is folded down small at the bottom of a well and hasn't surfaced in a long time.

Rue's happy.

That's the part I hold onto and the part that guts me, both at once.

She got her friend back.

That's her story, and it's a good story, and Ezra built it for her as carefully as he built everything.

After the private year, after the comeback, once he was certain of me, he let her back in.

A gift.

A reward, though I was never sure whose.

She drove up the mountain terrified it wouldn't be me anymore, and I met her in the courtyard and she burst into tears and held onto me.

I held her back and performed the friend she'd lost so well that she believed it, because I've had years of practice performing, and there’s no one alive I'd rather lie to convincingly than Rue.

"Look at you," she says now, in the kitchen, and she puts her hand on my belly, next to where mine already rests. "Three of them. Wren Holloway, mother of three. I never in my life."

"Vane," I say, gently, because Ezra likes to hear it and the walls have his ears in them. "Wren Vane."

"Vane." She rolls her eyes, fond, the old Rue eye-roll, the one from before any of this. "Still can't get used to it. You, married. You, with babies. You who wouldn't sit still long enough to keep a houseplant alive."

I laugh, and it's real, and that's the worst of it, that so much of what I do now is real.

The laugh is real.

The love for her is real.

The two little ones asleep upstairs are real, and I would die for them, have already died for them in every way that matters, given up every road out because three children make leaving something you can’t even let yourself think about.

The baby coming is real, kicking under our two hands right now like it knows we're talking about it.

All of it is real.

All of it a cage.

I stopped being able to tell the difference so long ago that the question doesn't even have edges anymore.

Rue stays through the party and the fireworks Ezra pays for.

The ones that explode gold and red over the woods where he hunted me, and she doesn't feel me flinch at the first one because I've learned not to flinch where anyone can see.

She stays the night in the guest wing.

In the morning she loads her bag into the old red truck with the dent I put in it a lifetime ago, and she hugs me on the gravel where the cars come and go.

She holds on the way she always holds on, a moment too long, fierce.

"You'd tell me," she says into my hair. "If you weren't happy. Right? You'd tell me."