Page 3 of Sage Haven

He was a master of pessimism. Some people called it cynicism. But I knew better.

For him, it wasn’t just a belief. It was a truth.

One carved out of bone-deep misfortune. A lesson learned the hard way and over too many years, that was paid for in scars both visible and hidden.

Growing up, I never once doubted his conviction because I truly lived it. Our lives had unfolded like a series of dull, gray days, broken only by brief flashes of something brighter. But even in those moments, the rare fragments of happiness never lasted. They slipped through our fingers like dry sand, no matter how tightly we tried to hold on.

Even when my mother was still there, smiling with that distant look in her eyes, joy was fragile. Almost ephemeral.

One wrong word. One sharp glance. That was all it took to shatter it completely, until one day, she was just simply… gone.

No warnings. No explanations.

She just vanished like dust being taken by the wind, leaving behind only the faintest whisper of her absence, like the echo of a song long forgotten.

After that, my father stopped pretending.

He dimmed.

A man who had once been full of life, in his own strange, dark way, became little more than a shadow draped in old flannel and regret. He carried his grief like a heavy, unshakable weight. And somehow, in the cruel calculus of family inheritance, I took on that burden too.

As if her disappearance wasn’t just his cross to bear, but mine as well.

Every day, I woke up beneath the weight of unanswered questions.

Every night, I laid them to rest like ghosts I couldn’t quite put to sleep.

It took years before I saw my father smile again. And even then, it wasn’t the kind of smile that reached his eyes. It was thin and hollow. A mask carefully placed to make others more comfortable, to hide the ache he carried like an old wound that never fully healed.

Regardless, we stayed close because we were all each other had.

We spent long hours together, sitting in the dark, talking about the things we could not control.

Generally, this consisted of the universe and human nature.

We tried to make sense of the chaos. Tried to stitch meaning into the vacant holes my mother had left behind, but no amount of words could fill that space, and in time, I stopped trying.

By the time I reached my freshman year of college, my father’s body had begun to betray him. He grew thinner, weaker and his once sharp mind began to soften at the edges as sickness overtook him.

I dropped everything—school, friends, plans for the future that already felt flimsy at best. I took odd jobs to pay for his treatment and our livelihoods when he no longer could. Anything to keep us afloat and to keep the fragile world we’d rebuilt from collapsing again.

One of those jobs led me toThe Bloodwine. A club pulsing at the center of the city’s rotting heart. It was a place where money and desperation met under red lights and low ceilings, where men whispered promises they never intended to keep.

It was there that I met Klay.

He was everything I wasn’t.

Charming. Confident.

Money to burn and no shame about setting it all a blaze, but it wasn’t his physical presence or outward show that drew me in.

It was his focus.

He saw me…or at least, hepretended to.

And after so many months of feeling invisible, of being just another girl pouring drinks and counting tips to buy her father’s pills, I was desperate to be seen.

Klay became a regular. He always requested me. Always flirted, making me feel wanted and desired. Something I hadn’t ever felt before.