Page 2 of Blackthorn Ridge

What she’d done.

Slaps hard enough to knock her sideways. Punches placed carefully, strategically, where the bruises wouldn't show. She got good at not showing the bruises. Got good at not showing much of anything.

The worst incident — the one that lived in her body even when her brain tried to forget it — happened when she was eleven.

She was washing the dishes after making his dinner. He'd been drinking and smoking since noon, sitting at the kitchen table critiquing everything — the food was bland, she'd used too much butter, she was getting fat, did she know that? Did she know how she looked? She kept her eyes on the dishes and her hands in the hot water and her face very, very still. Then her hands slipped and a plate hit the edge of the sink and shattered.

The sound Rick made wasn't quite human.

He crossed the kitchen in two steps. Grabbed her by the hair — a fistful of it at the back of her head — and slammed her face-first into the edge of the kitchen table. The crack of her nose breaking was the loudest thing she'd ever heard. The pain came a half-second later, white and enormous and total, and then she was on the floor and she couldn't tell which way was up and there was blood on the linoleum, a lot of blood, and Rick was still talking — clumsy, stupid, look at this mess — as he dragged her by the arm down the hallway and threw her into her room and turned the lock from the outside.

She stayed there for eighteen hours. No food. No water. At some point she stopped crying because there wasn't any point to it, and then at some point after that she wet herself because there was no other option, and then she just lay on the floor and stared at the water stain on the ceiling until the light changed and changed again and the lock finally turned.

He made her clean it up.

This is what happens when you're clumsy, he told her. His voice was perfectly calm. He looked almost bored.

She never broke another dish.

The summer she turned twelve, her body betrayed her.

It happened fast — a kind of fast that felt cruel, like her body had been waiting for the worst possible moment to change. Her hips widened. Her breasts filled out. Her thighs, her waist, and her bottom rounding into something she didn't recognize, something that didn't feel like hers.

She tried to hide it under baggy clothes, layers and layers even in the heat, hoodies zipped to her chin. She wasn't sure exactly what she was hiding from. Just that something in Rick's eyes had shifted when he looked at her, and whatever that shift was, she didn't want more of it.

She tried to hide.

Rick saw her anyway.

She didn’t remember what she'd done to fall asleep that first night — whether she'd read, whether she'd watched the water stain, whether sleep had just come and taken her. She remembered the sound of her door opening. The smell of him — whiskey, weed, something underneath both of those that she had no name for yet.

He sat on the edge of her bed. Just sat there.

She kept herself very still. Controlled her breathing. Tried to be invisible. Maybe if she didn't move, didn't exist, he'd go away.

He didn't go away.

You're growing up, Sage. His voice was quiet. Almost gentle, which was somehow worse than when he yelled. Becoming a woman. Your mom left, so now it's your job to take care of me. You understand? Family takes care of each other.

His hand moved to her hair.

She went somewhere else.

Not a deliberate decision — just her mind making a choice her body couldn't. One moment she was on the bed, and then she was somewhere above it, watching from a distance, counting the tiles on the ceiling. She got to forty-seven before he was done. She remembered that number for years afterward. Forty-seven. It meant nothing and it was the only thing she had.

She lay completely still until she heard his door close. Then she got up, very quietly, walked to the bathroom, and threw up until there was nothing left. She flushed twice. Made sure there was no trace of it. Then she went back to her room and sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the wall until the sun came up.

She didn't tell anyone.

He'd told her what happened to girls who told. Foster care, he’d said. Girls got raped there every day. At least I love you. She was twelve and she had nowhere to go and the world outside her front door was just another version of the same trap, so she believed him, and she stayed, and she learned how to count ceiling tiles and recite the alphabet backward and go somewhere else when her body stopped being her own.

It happened two, sometimes three times a week. The specifics changed over time, gradually, the way water changes rock — slowly and then completely. She learned not to cry, or rather she learned to cry silently, tears running sideways into the pillow while she stared at the ceiling and counted. She got slapped for other things. Learned which reactions made it worse and which made it end faster.

It was a few weeks later the when she felt something tear for the first time. He told her to say thank you. She said it. She learned to say whatever kept the night shorter.

After a while, she started to believe some of it. That's the thing people didn't understand, the thing she could never explain later — it wasn't that she forgot what he was doing to her was wrong. It was that wrong started to feel like the shape of the world. Like the floor of it. Like the thing everything else stood on.

Her only comfort was a small stuffed black bear named Shadow she had since before she could remember. She held it at night pretending it was real and it would protect her. But it never could.