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Felicity crossed the room without turning on the light, lowered herself to the floor like it was the most natural thing in the world, and put her arms around Sage. Just held her. No conditions. No agenda. Just warmth, the smell of hospital soap and something underneath it that Sage's body recognized before her brain did.

Safe. Something safe.

Sage grabbed onto her and shook apart completely, and Felicity held on through all of it, and didn't say anything for a long time. When she finally spoke it was just: I've got you. I've got you. You're okay.

Sage didn't believe her. But she didn't let go either.

Felicity didn't leave after that.

Sage watched her make the decision in real time — watched the thoughts pass across her face in the following days, the “I should go” losing every time to something fiercer and more stubborn. She stayed. She started leaving food outside Sage's door when Rick was in one of his moods. Started making small, careful interventions — nothing Rick would notice, nothing that would set him off, but consistent. Present. A hand on Sage's shoulder when she passed in the hallway. I see you. Small and enormous all at once.

She stayed because of Sage.

Sage understood this later. At the time she just felt it — this strange weight of being the reason someone chose to stay somewhere terrible, and not knowing if that was a burden or a gift. Both, she decided eventually. It was always both.

Felicity worked nights.

That was the thing that saved them. She worked nights, which meant she sometimes came home early when shifts got cancelled, which meant she was there on a Tuesday in November six months into the marriage when the apartment was dark and she heard sounds from Sage's room that she shouldn't have been able to hear from the front door.

Sage found out later that Felicity had stood in the hallway for thirty seconds. Just stood there, unable to make her brain accept the information her ears were giving it. Thirty seconds of her understanding shifting, cracking, reorganizing itself around something unbearable.

Then she went to the hall closet and got the crowbar.

Sage was counting.

She was at thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three — eyes fixed on the water stain she'd memorized years ago, the one that looked faintly like a bird if you tilted your head — when the door opened.

She registered Felicity's presence the way she registered most things now: from a distance, filtered, her brain slow to assign meaning to the information. The crowbar didn't fully process until Felicity raised it.

The sound it made when it connected with the back of Rick's skull was nothing like what Sage expected. Lower. Wetter. Rick made a sound that wasn't a word and then he was off her, falling sideways, and there was blood — not a lot, but enough — and then he was on the floor and he wasn't moving.

Felicity was shaking so hard the crowbar rattled against the floor when she set it down. Her eyes found Sage's.

Pack a bag. Her voice was completely steady. The rest of her wasn't, but her voice was. Now. We're leaving.

Sage looked at Rick on the floor. Is he⁠—

I don't care. Felicity was already pulling Sage's blanket up, wrapping it around her shoulders, moving. Get up. Move. We're going, baby, right now, we're going.

They packed in ten minutes. Maybe less. Sage moved through it with a strange efficiency. It was as if she had been mentally rehearsing this moment for years — her sketchbooks, her clothes, the twenty-three dollars she'd hidden in the lining of her jacket. Felicity grabbed her purse and her keys and they walked out the front door and they didn't look back and they didn't check if he was breathing.

They never found out.

Sage didn't lose sleep over it.

The apartment was a studio in a neighborhood that smelled like exhaust and fried food, with a bathroom so small you had to turn sideways to close the door. Felicity paid cash for three months up front. Changed their phone numbers. Bought Sage a box of red hair dye and used it over the bathroom sink, the two of them laughing when they splashed it on the walls, on the towels, on Felicity's forearm up to the elbow.

Great, Felicity said, staring at her arm. I look like I lost a fight with a strawberry monster.

Sage laughed.

It came out strange — rusty, unpracticed, like something she'd forgotten how to do. Felicity looked at her like she'd witnessed a small miracle. Maybe she had.

Therapy was Felicity's idea and Sage's first instinct was to refuse — I'm fine, I don't need— but Felicity had a type of immovable gentleness that Sage was still learning how to argue with, and so she went. A sliding-scale clinic, a therapist named Dr. Alvarez with patient eyes and a box of tissues on every surface. Sage sat down in the chair across from her and said she was fine for five minutes before something in her chest cracked open and she yelled the filthiest obscenities and cried for ninety minutes straight.

The diagnoses came over the next few weeks. PTSD. Depression. The clinical language for things her body had been telling her for years in the only language it knew. She started learning other languages. It was slow, and it was brutal, and there were weeks she went backward faster than she went forward.

Six months out, she sat on the bathroom floor with a razor and pressed it to her wrist watching the blood begin to pool and went still. The feeling of that razor piercing through skin felt like heaven. Her hands shook as she pressed again.