21 Jul 2025, 18:56
One For The Money, Two For The Show
date- July 21st, 2025
read the first london solo hereSage was still waiting to receive her playbill for the Willows’ show. A show made up by lies and distrust, by separation and pain. With the flourish and finishing touch of a door slamming to the performance, very few had seen what went on behind the stage.
She had spent one night in her childhood bedroom, back there like she was once again trapped- suffocated- there. She’d woken with a stifled cry in the middle of the night, afraid like she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had.
The walls of Christopher Willows’ house held more than dust. Bitter tears and childhood terrors, and now they embraced a sad teenage girl and her little sister who wasn’t so little anymore. She had every reason to be afraid, every reason to wake in the morning with a soaked pillow thanks to her tears.
Sitting alone in her room which felt too big, Sage swiped on the mascara her dad had bought before her arrival. “To make you feel pretty” was what he told her after dinner the day of her arrival. To make me feel fake, was what Sage decided he’d meant.
“It’s just a family dinner” quickly transformed into a mantra. If she could survive the previous family dinner the other night, there was no reason on Earth for the next to be any harder.
The small makeshift mirror Sage was using to get ready barely had enough surface area to show her entire face. She guessed Christopher had only thrown it in there at the last minute.
“Sage!” Christopher tapped his knuckles on her door. “They’ll be here any minute, hurry up!”
Sage adjusted the braid she’d done, smoothing the stray hairs she knew her aunts would fuss over just as they had last night. “Just give me a minute!”
“We don’t have time for minutes, get out here!”
She heard the doorbell and the click of the front door followed by the chorus of voices and different accents.
“Tyson! Good to see you, new hair trim?”
“Hopefully we aren’t late, the kids spilled their juices just before we left!”
“We didn’t come all this way just to see you, Christopher, did we?”
“Come, now, there’s more room in the living room. Kora and Thomas are there waiting.”
“Aw, don’t tell me Sage got cold feet last minute.”
“You know her, always hiding. Barely seen her out of that room since she arrived.” She could practically hear Christopher shaking his head as the collection of her family passed her door.
It felt weird, calling the room her’s. It wasn’t. Not anymore. Not for a long time. The only evidence that the room didn’t belong to a ghost was the indent on the pillow. Maybe part of her was a ghost though. The part of her that would have been running out to embrace her family with no tears in her eyes. The part of her that loved the “Willows” part of herself. The part that wasn’t her anymore.
She didn’t mourn. Not anymore.
Between a brief intermission, Sage found herself at the dinner table, smushed between Kora and her cousin Ane. None of the girls looked pleased to be where they were.
“Have you started uni, Ane?” she asked in an attempt to be civil.
Before Ane had a chance to talk, her mother, Sage’s aunt Sophia, said, “Ane’s doing a bit of traveling before she commits to uni.”
“Oh, sounds nice. Where to?”
“Round Europe and a lot of the continent.” Ane shoveled a bite of the roast into her mouth. “Better than boarding school.”
“Of course, I wanted her to attend Oxford, but that wasn’t in our family’s cards,” Uncle Tyson said. “Utter shame.”
“I mean, there’s other great schools out there.”
“Of course you say that,” Christopher mumbled over his plate.
Sage dropped her utensil, forcing everyone to look up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Silence surrounded the air.
“You don’t know good from bad, Sage. I’ve given you every grand opportunity, you know how many kids would kill for a summer in London with their dad? Every gesture I make, you treat me like it’s the worst thing to have your father making sacrifices for you.”
“That has nothing to do with me telling Ane there are other good schools.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Christopher muttered in reply.
“Do I? Because for once I feel like I’m thinking straight. This entire thing, these so-called family dinners and holidays together, it’s all a ruse. It’s all some performance so you can convince yourself you’re a good dad.”
“Kids, go in the living room”, she heard her Aunt Marietta whisper to her little cousins Amelia and Bowen.
Sage closed her eyes, holding tears back. “I know you think you’re some great father for having me here for 18 days. But you aren’t. I didn’t see or hear from you in years to have you suddenly shove yourself back in when I was twelve. I made it this far without you and I can do it again.”
This time, her Uncle Joseph spoke up. “Chris, brother, your daughter’s got a point. You complained to me constantly how you wanted her to come back and live with you, and now she is and you act like she needs to be quarantined.”
“A girl can’t grow up properly without a dad,” added Uncle Tyson.
“Oh, give me a break! Like you know anything about that!” Aunt Sophia scolded Tyson.
Miniature fights broke out all over the table, Sophia shouting at Tyson with neither of them noticing how Ane left the table and slammed the front door. Marietta could be heard comforting her kids in the living room. Christopher yelled at Joseph for undermining him like that while his brother attempted to calm him down. Kora reached for Sage’s hand under the table while both sat there trying to remember how to breathe clearly.
“Well,” Sage whispered to her sister, “at least you didn’t accidentally levitate all the cups this time.”
A shout from her grandfather at the head of the table sounded like thunder. “Enough!” He slammed his hands down on the table. “Tyson, how can you act like this? Your mum would be very disappointed in you.” He shook his head, looking up to point at Christopher. “And you, Christopher, are shouting at your own brother and treating your daughter like trash. Even I know that’s not right. Nothing about how this family is acting is right. I only came here for a sense of recovery after my Iris died, to visit my daughter’s grave. None of this is what I’m here for. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”
“I can’t do this,” Sage admitted. “I can’t act like the rest of you are. This is why several of us changed our surnames, to avoid connection with this excuse of a family. Grandpa’s right. This isn’t what I came here for.” Sage dropped Kora’s hand and stood. “I won’t sit here and watch this happen, come on Kora.”
Not quite knowing where she was going, Sage and her sister left the table. The way the front door slammed was nowhere near as loud as the fighting had been. In the driveway, she saw Ane inside her car, crying. Her hands shook at her side.
“Let’s just go round the block. Then we’ll head back.”
After a few minutes of walking, Kora said to Sage, “They’re getting a divorce, aren’t they? Christopher and Mum?”
She stopped walking. She knew Cassie had brought it up before, but never really went anywhere with it. But the reality of it was real. At any moment, the papers could be signed. Her life could split like the ground in an earthquake yet again.
And she knew who she would have to pick.
But there was no way to put any of this into words. Instead, she just said, “I don’t know.”
Sage never was ready, now she watched the truth unfold. She would never be ready to let go. This is all she would ever be.@Brookline Quinn as she asked to be pinged