Chapter 6 - Where Sage BelongedThe Ravenswood Children's Hospital gala came around again the following year, and Gideon nearly canceled the family's attendance entirely before Sage, seven years old now and considerably steadier than the girl who'd fled that ballroom in tears twelve months earlier, told him plainly that she wanted to go.
"I want to see it be different," she said. "Not scary this time."
He agreed, on the condition that she could leave the moment she wanted to, no explanation required, and that Owen Faust would be within arm's reach of her the entire evening — a promise he intended to keep personally as much as through his security team.
The evening went, in the end, almost entirely unremarkably, which felt, to Gideon, like its own kind of quiet victory. Sage stood beside him near the entrance for the first twenty minutes, introduced this time not as an unexplained child trailing behind the family, but as his daughter, stated plainly to anyone who asked, with nothing left to hide and no one left with the authorization to make sure it went wrong.
A few guests remembered the scene from the year before and had the grace to say nothing about it. A few others, kinder, made a point of crouching down to properly introduce themselves to Sage this time, asking her name before assuming they already knew everything they needed to know about whether she belonged there.
Near the end of the evening, Sage tugged on Gideon's sleeve and pointed toward the dessert table, where a woman was helping a much younger child pick out a cookie. "That's what Owen said security is for now," she said. "Making sure nobody decides someone doesn't belong before they even ask."
"That's exactly what it's for," Gideon agreed.
Later that night, back at Ashcombe Manor, he found her sitting on her bedroom floor, the gray suitcase open beside her, adding the folded program from that evening's gala to the bundle of her mother's letters, tucking it in carefully like something worth keeping alongside everything else Elise had left her.
"You don't have to keep everything in that suitcase anymore, you know," Gideon said gently, sitting down beside her. "You have drawers. A whole closet. This is your home now, for as long as you want it to be."
Sage considered that for a moment, then zipped the suitcase closed anyway, sliding it back under her bed within easy reach.
May you like
"I know," she said. "I just like knowing it's there. In case I ever need to remember where I came from."
Gideon didn't argue with that. He understood, better than he once had, that some things earn the right to stay close for as long as a person needs them to — and that home, for Sage, was never going to be about a suitcase at all, but about finally having somewhere worth keeping one.
