Page 177 of On Edge

It was too much for me to know my mother washed her hands of her family, leaving her broken daughter with her cheating, lying husband to deal with. So far, I’ve pieced together that they disagreed on the method of my recovery. Instead of therapy, my father decided to let me believe Nell was real.

But why?

What was so awful that my father wanted me to believe my imagined memories rather than the truth? And why did my mother let him?

I waituntil my father is asleep, and then I push open his office door and lightly step inside. He’s snoring, lying on his account book, dribbling on the paper, and smearing ink.

I kneel beside his desk and pull open the loose carpet, easily finding the location of his safe. The code to the keypad hasn’tchanged. My hands shake as I punch in the numbers I left for myself scratched into the side of my wardrobe in case I forgot.

The door opens, and inside, it’s dark but organized, full of legal documents, share certificates, our family passports, even money. But I’m not here for them.

I find what I’m looking for in a nondescript folder, pages and pages of diary entries that make up the missing half of my life. Then I turn on the desk lamp to wait, reading the missing pages my father kept from me.

And gradually, like waking from a nightmare, I take it all in again.

Everything.

When my father wakes, naturally woken by the light being on, he stills when he sees me sitting there on his couch.

In my hands is the razor I stole from Troy. I found it between the stones when I went back up the tower that one last time. My father watches with wary eyes as I flip it over and over in my fingers. He tenses, testing the wires around his wrists and ankles that I’ve used to tie him to his chair with, before sitting back and exhaling a breath, slow and sure.

“Sage.”

I smile at him. “Yes, father?”

There’s always a calm before the storm.

41

TROY

Sage is sitting quietly, reading a bloodied notebook. She’s covered in blood from head to toe, and on the desk next to her is the dead body of her father, with his wrists slit open wide, and two pools of blood, like twin suns, growing brighter with each second that passes.

I’m too late.

But then, am I?

She looks up as I walk in. “I’m not crazy,” is the first thing she says to me.

My eyes flit to her dead dad and then back to Mercy on her lap, next to the book. “Alright.”

“He deserved to die.” She indicates the book in her hands, and the loose, ripped-out pages scattered like falling leaves on the floor. “I documented every crime he committed when I was Nell. When he found out, I was already in the hospital with severe brain trauma, and he took her away from me.”

I must have frowned at that because she shook her head. “I mean, he took those memories away. And when I woke up, itwas like a hole was missing in my life because the diary only had parts of it.”

“That hole was Nell?”

“Me, when I was pretending to be Nell, yes. I wasn’t crazy, I just gave myself an alter ego to carry out the darker things I was ashamed of, like you do with Sweeney.”

“Sweeney is me.”

Her brow furrows.

I sigh. Of course, she doesn’t know that. “Sweeney is what my family namewas, before my ancestors anglicized it to Swanley when they came from Ireland in the 1400s. Mac Suibhne became Swanley so we’d sound properly English.

She nods solemnly. “Oh, I know, Laine showed me your family tree. But why did you change your name a third time?”

“Because.” I sit down on the sofa because I’m tired of standing, and this feels like it’s going to take a while longer than I anticipated. “Severin sounds cool.”