Chapter 5 - What Sage KeptIt took Sage longer than the board review to trust that Ashcombe Manor was somewhere she was allowed to actually be, rather than somewhere she was being temporarily tolerated.
Gideon didn't push it. He'd read enough of Elise's letters by then to understand, in fragments, the kind of mother she'd been — patient, steady, careful never to make Sage feel like an inconvenience even when money had clearly been tight in the years after she left Ravenswood. He tried, clumsily at first and then with more confidence, to build something similar, one ordinary day at a time rather than one grand gesture.
The gray suitcase stayed in Sage's room, unpacked now into drawers and a small closet, but never fully put away — she kept it under her bed, still within reach, and Gideon eventually stopped trying to talk her out of it, understanding that six years of foster placements and one dead mother had taught her, reasonably, that homes could disappear without warning and suitcases couldn't.
He read her the letters, eventually, a few at a time, once Priya Osei — who continued checking in monthly even after the formal custody arrangement was finalized — gently suggested it might help Sage understand that her mother had never stopped fighting for her to know him, even when it looked, for years, like nothing was working.
"She really tried that many times?" Sage asked one evening, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the ribbon-tied bundle between them.
"Eleven times that we know of," Gideon said. "Probably more we'll never find. She never gave up on getting you to me, Sage. Not once."
Sage was quiet for a while, turning that over the way six-year-olds do, processing something too large to hold all at once. "Uncle Preston made it not work," she finally said. It wasn't a question.
May you like
"Yes," Gideon said, because there was no version of that answer he was willing to soften for her. "He did. And he's not going to have the chance to make decisions like that again."
Eleanor, to Gideon's genuine surprise, became one of Sage's steadiest presences over the following months — not out of the same warmth he was slowly building himself, but out of something that looked, at least, like a determined effort to make up for the version of the family that had let this happen at all. She started Sunday visits, small and awkward at first, gradually settling into something closer to routine.
