Page 5 of Blackthorn Ridge

It’s not that she wanted to die, exactly. But she was so tired of carrying everything, and she couldn't find any other way to put it down.

She pressed a little more. Made a solid mark that bled thin and shallow, more like a question than an answer. And then she sat there and looked at it and thought, with sudden clarity: Felicity would find me.

That was the thing that stopped her.

Not herself — she wasn't there yet, didn't have enough of herself back yet to stop for her own sake. But Felicity. The image of Felicity finding her. The way that would break something in her that Sage had already watched be broken enough.

She put the razor down with trembling hands.

Felicity found her anyway — came home from a shift to find Sage on the floor, the thin evidence of it on her wrist, but she didn't yell or lecture. She just got down on the floor next to her and held her and cried, ugly honest tears, and said, “Please don't leave me, baby. I love you. I can't lose you.”

“I don't know how to live with this,” Sage said. It was the first honest thing she'd said to anyone in years. “I don’t know if I want to live anymore.”

“We'll learn together,” Felicity said. “Just stay. Please just stay.”

Sage stayed.

The transformation happened the way most real things happen — gradually, then all at once.

When Sage was sixteen she found goth forums online, the message boards and the local shows and the community of kids who wore their darkness on the outside, who made art out of pain, who scared people away on purpose because scared people kept their distance and distance was safe. It resonated somewhere deep and wordless. She brought it to Felicity like a question.

“Can I dye my hair and add highlights? Can I shave part of it? Get piercings? Tattoos?”

Felicity didn't hesitate. “Yes. Let's do it together.”

So they did.

Dark hair with purple streaks, the dye all over the bathroom walls again. A cartilage piercing, then a nostril, then her lip and tongue — Felicity holding her hand for each one, threatening to pass out every time and then not passing out and calling herself a hero. Her first tattoo before her seventeenth birthday, Felicity signing the consent form with a proud flourish and paying for it while photographing the whole thing and crying when the needle first touched Sage's skin because, of course she did.

“That's my daughter getting her first tattoo,” she told the tattoo artist, completely unprompted. “She's going to be famous one day.”

Sage rolled her eyes so hard it hurt.

She was smiling when she did it.

The guitar came later — Dr. Alvarez had said something about embodied practices, about putting yourself back inside your body in ways that felt safe. Sage had found a cheap electric guitar and amp at a pawnshop and started learning chords from videos, hunched over the instrument in the corner of their little apartment while Felicity read on the couch nearby and pretended not to listen and then said, “that was beautiful” every single time.

Sage got better. At guitar, at therapy, at existing inside her own skin. Some days she still felt like she was watching herself from the ceiling — the old dissociation, the old distance — but she was learning to come back. To let the guitar string under her fingers be real. To let Felicity's voice saying, “I love you” be real.

Maybe she wasn't ruined. Maybe some things had survived what Rick had done to them.

She was seventeen when she started to really believe that.

She was seventeen when she applied to the University of Utah — art and music program, full ride, a long shot she took because Felicity had been telling her for two years that her work was extraordinary, and she'd finally gotten brave enough to see if anyone else agreed.

The letter came on a Tuesday.

Felicity screamed. Picked her up — actually picked her up, all soft warmth and happy tears — and spun her around the apartment and kissed her forehead a hundred times while Sage laughed and tried to wriggle free and couldn't quite make herself.

“I'm so proud of you, baby.” Felicity's face. She'd remember that face. “You did it. You're getting out. You're going to be a famous artist and I'm going to tell everyone — her voice broke, rebuilt itself — “that's MY daughter.”

Sage cried. Happy tears, for once. She hadn't known she still had those.

That night she played a mournful rendition of Billie Eilish's "Lovely" at a nearby bar, her favorite song. And felt maybe…just maybe she got to be happy too.

It was monsoon season in Phoenix.

Felicity was driving home after a double shift — sixteen hours, tired in the way that gets into your bones — when a semi hydroplaned on the slick road and crossed the center line and hit her car on the driver's side with the kind of force that doesn't leave room for survival. The impact crushed the door inward. Internal bleeding, crushed chest, gone before the ambulance arrived.