Page 1
PROLOGUE
Sage Thompson hated her body.
She'd hated it for as long as she could remember — which, if she was being honest with herself, wasn't all that long.
Memory was funny that way.
It had a habit of protecting you from the things that would destroy you if you looked at them straight on, of blurring the edges until you couldn't tell what was real and what your brain had just invented to fill in the gaps.
The earliest thing Sage could clearly remember was the sound of her mother's voice.
Not her face. Or calling her mama. Just the voice — soft and low, humming something sweet in the dark. Somewhere over the rainbow maybe, or some other bullshit lullaby of cupcakes and skittles that was just a lie.
The words were mostly gone now, worn smooth from years of her turning them over in her head like pieces of jagged glass worn down in the relentless ocean surf, but the melody stayed. The feeling stayed. The sense of evasive safety — like being held by something warm that slips away when you turn to it.
She'd been six when she came home from school and her mother was simply gone.
No note.
No explanation.
Just a Tuesday morning that became a Tuesday afternoon that became a Tuesday night, and then it was Wednesday, and then it was a month, and then it was her life.
Her father told Sage that it was her fault.
She'd believed him. She believed him for a long time.
Rick Thompson was handsome the way a con man was handsome — easy smile, sharp jaw, the type of face that made people want to trust him before he'd done a single thing to earn it.
His coworkers bought him beers. His neighbors called him a good guy going through a rough patch. His daughter learned, slowly and then all at once, that the version of him the world saw and the version of him that existed inside their house were two entirely different men.
After her mother left, Rick's drinking got worse. Then came the drugs — meth, mostly, when Sage was around ten, which made the paranoia worse and the rage faster and the gaps between incidents shorter and shorter.
He lost his construction job. Bounced between odd jobs and unemployment and muttering at the walls. The house got smaller somehow. The air got thicker.
The rules were simple, and Sage learned them the way children learn everything — through repetition, through consequence, through the body's quiet and relentless memory.
Don't cry.
Don't talk back.
Don't ask for things.
Be useful. Stay small.
She couldn't always manage small. That was the problem.
She was eight the first time he forgot to pick her up from school.
She sat on the front steps for two hours watching the other kids get collected by their parents, watching the teachers go back inside one by one, watching the parking lot empty out until she was the only thing left in it.
She eventually walked home. Three miles in shoes that were half a size too small, her backpack straps cutting into her shoulders. He was asleep on the couch when she got there, beer cans stacked on the coffee table like little monuments to nothing, and a mirror with white powder on the nearby coffee table.
She made herself a bowl of cereal for dinner and did her homework on the kitchen floor and didn't say a word about it in the morning.
She learned not to need things from him. It was easier that way.
But she was still too loud sometimes. Still too much work. He reminded her of this regularly, and enthusiastically, with his hands and his belt and with hours alone in the dark of her room where she could think about what she'd done.
