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“Motherfucker!!” She yelled, hitting the steering wheel.

Shadow was on the passenger seat where he always was, one button eye catching the parking lot light. She grabbed him. Pressed him against her chest — childish, stupid, she didn't care, there was no one left to perform for.

She'd been two seconds from it. Two seconds from handing over the last thing she had — the only choice Rick had never actually been able to take from her, no matter what he'd stolen around it.

She was still shaking when she pulled back onto the highway.

She didn't mean to find the cliff. She was just driving in any direction that felt like it meant something, and then the road curved and the guardrail ended and there it was — a long drop into the dark, nothing at the bottom that she could see, just a deep dark emptiness.

She pulled over.

She didn't turn the engine off. Just sat there with the headlights cutting into empty air and her hands in her lap and let herself think the thought she'd been not-thinking for three weeks. It was almost a relief, finally looking at it directly. Like putting down something heavy she'd been pretending wasn't heavy.

She'd found the mother she should have had from the beginning. Not the broken fucking cowardly bitch who'd disappeared when she was six. Not some fantasy. Felicity. Specific and real and soft around the middle, laughing about squid-colored hair dye, crying at tattoo parlors, saying, “that's my daughter” to strangers with a pride so complete and uncomplicated that Sage had never once doubted it.

She'd had her for two years.

Two years of learning what it felt like to be loved without conditions, without cost, without having to count anything. Two years of becoming someone she almost recognized. And then the universe or God or whatever the fuck controlled all this bullshit, had looked at what they'd built together and sent a semi hydroplaning across a wet road on a Tuesday, and that was that. And that…was that.

What’s the fucking point?

She pressed her palm flat against the cold window glass. Looked out at the drop.

If I give up, she thought, he wins.

The thought arrived without the impact she expected. Just a fact. Clean and as simple as breathing. She'd spent years being destroyed by her father and years being rebuilt and months being dismantled again and she was so tired. So completely exhausted…down to her bones, but somewhere underneath the exhaustion was that old furnace. That rage she'd tended so carefully in the dark, fed it when there was nothing else to eat, kept it burning because it was hers and he hadn't taken it.

If I give up, he wins.

She put the Jeep into drive.

She crossed into Montana four days later on the last eight dollars' worth of gas, which turned out to be almost exactly enough. The mountains rose slowly and enormous out of the dark, and the sky above them was so full of stars it looked like pinpricks in a dark velvet tapestry.

She'd been driving with her breath fogging in front of her for two days. The opened sleeping bag was pulled up to her chin between stops. Shadow was tucked under her jaw and somewhere in the last 100 miles she'd stopped being embarrassed about that.

The last page in her sketchbook was a self-portrait done at a truck stop mirror — her own face looking back at her rendered in charcoal, and she'd gotten it right because she stopped thinking and just drew. The eyes were the truest part. Not sad, exactly. Just empty. Just done.

She ate out of the trash again while drawing and she'd written one word underneath in small careful letters. Survive.

She wasn't sure anymore if that was a promise or a question.

The sign came up fast in the headlights. BLACKTHORN RIDGE — 10 MILES.

She watched it appear and disappear in the rearview and at first felt nothing. The gas gauge had been resting against E for twenty-three miles. The Jeep was running on stubbornness and whatever small remainder of goodwill the universe still owed her, which she'd long since stopped counting on, but apparently hadn't run out of yet.

She thought about Felicity. She did this constantly and she couldn't stop doing it. Felicity, who would have taken this exit without a second thought. Who would have said, “Baby, God has a plan and will provide” with that absolute certainty she'd had about things, a faith that embarrassed Sage sometimes and that she'd give anything to have.

If God exists he’s an asshole.

She thought about the cliff. The long drop, the headlights cutting into empty air, the way she'd sat with the engine running and let herself think about ending it. She'd driven away from it. Told herself if I give up, Rick wins, because that was the argument that worked, the only one she seemed to respond to — not “you have things to live for” or “it gets better” but the cold hard rage of refusing to let him have the last word.

She'd driven away.

But she was so tired.

She was so completely, absolutely exhausted, a kind of tired that sleep didn't touch anymore. She'd found the mother she should have had from the beginning — not a fantasy, not a wish, but Felicity, true and real and soft and certain — and had two years with her before the semi on a Tuesday took her back.

What was the point? What was the fucking point of surviving Rick if this was what survival looked like. A Jeep with no heat, a few dollars, a stuffed bear with one eye, and a girl who was so hollowed out she'd almost sold herself to a stranger in a Wyoming parking lot for forty dollars and a plate of eggs.