Page 9 of Blackthorn Ridge

She took the exit because the Jeep made the decision for her — a shudder through the whole frame as she touched the off-ramp, the engine coughing like something with fluid in its lungs, and she thought, okay, okay, wherever this stops and let it roll.

The town came up slowly. She hadn't known there was a town — just saw the sign, took the ramp, followed the road because it was going somewhere and she'd run out of reasons to care where. Main Street, maybe, or what passed for it out here — storefronts, a hardware store, a bar with its neon sign shining. It had the peacefulness of a small town after nine at night that felt less like quiet and more like the whole place holding its breath. Snow on the edges of the road. Her headlights catching it in weak yellow arcs.

She was shivering so hard her teeth were chattering. Had been for days — the deep, feverish shivering of a body that had stopped being warm and started just trying to maintain. Her head hurt and had been hurting for a while. It was a pain that sat behind her eyes and pulsed with her heartbeat, and she was pretty sure her fever was bad because the cold felt like it was coming from inside her as much as outside, and she kept losing small chunks of time — not sleeping, just gone for a few seconds and then back, hands still on the wheel, road still under her.

She hadn't eaten since the trash can at a rest stop in Wyoming. That was — she counted, lost count, tried again. Two days ago? Maybe three?

The Jeep shuddered again. Harder this time. The engine light had been on for days but now something else flickered on the dash — she didn't know cars well enough to know what it meant, only that it was new and red and the Jeep was decelerating in a way that had nothing to do with her foot.

Okay, she thought. Okay.

She let it slow. Pulled toward the curb on pure instinct, the vehicle barely cooperating, rolling the last fifty feet on momentum before it stopped with a sound like a long exhale and went quiet.

She sat there.

The heater had been dead for two weeks so there was no loss there, just the awareness of the cold pressing in through every seam and crack, the windows already starting to fog from her breath. She could see it — each exhale a small ghost in the dark. Shadow was in her lap. She didn't remember picking him up.

She thought about the cliff again. The way the headlights had cut into all that empty air. She'd driven away from it…but she was so tired now. So tired. She'd been running on spite and stubbornness for three weeks and she could feel both of them guttering out like a candle that's burned all the way to the bottom of the wax.

She had no money. She had a dead car on a street she didn't know in a town she'd never heard of. She had a fever climbing behind her eyes and a stomach that had stopped hurting and gone numb, which she dimly understood was worse. She had a stuffed bear with one eye and a note in her jacket pocket that said go live loud from a woman who was buried in Phoenix.

She thought about the razor.

About the bathroom floor at sixteen, and how Felicity had found her, and how she'd stopped because she couldn't stand the image of Felicity finding her. That reason was gone now. There was no one left to find her. No one who would notice in time. No one who would sit on the floor and hold her and say please don't leave me, I love you, just stay.

She pressed her forehead to the steering wheel.

The cold was getting into the sleeping bag. Into her fingers. She couldn't feel her toes anymore, had stopped being able to feel them somewhere around the state border, and she knew distantly that this was a problem she should care about more than she did.

She thought, I could just stay here.

She could just stay here in the Jeep and let the cold finish what four weeks on the road had started and it would be so much easier than whatever came next. So much quieter than everything that had come before. No more counting. No more math. No more waking up in the backseat at three in the morning with Rick's voice in her head saying things she'd spent years trying to unhear.

I’m so tired.

She was eighteen years old and she was so tired.

Her thumb had found its way to her mouth. She let it stay. She let herself be small and exhausted and finished in the dark of the dead Jeep on a street in Montana, just for a minute. Just while she figured out if she had anything left.

And then she heard it.

Come on, baby.

Felicity.

Come on, sweetheart. You're so close. Just a little more.

Was it her own mind playing tricks on her? Probably. Sage squeezed her eyes shut. Her throat closed around something that wanted to be a sob and couldn't quite get there.

I know you're tired. The voice, so perfectly Felicity — that blend of soft and certain, the voice that had held her on nightmare floors and tattoo parlor chairs and hospital waiting rooms. I know, baby. I know. But you didn't come all this way to stop here. You didn't survive all of that to stop here.

I can't mom, Sage thought, or maybe whispered. I’m so tired…can’t I just come with you? I want to go home. The fog on the windows had thickened. She couldn't see the street anymore.

No baby… you can do this. You can. No argument in it. Just certainty, the same certainty that had signed consent forms and screamed at scholarship letters and said, that's my daughter to strangers. One more time. Just get in there. Someone will help you. Let them help you.

Sage lifted her head from the steering wheel.

She looked out the windshield, and through the fog on the glass, she saw the light.