Chapter 6
I’m sitting alone at a table near the windows with a textbook open in front of me and a sandwich I have no intention of eating.
The dining hall at Edgewood is designed to feel like a great room in an English country house—vaulted ceiling, dark wood paneling, long tables meant for communal eating and the performance of social hierarchy.
Oil portraits of dead headmasters line the walls, each one staring down with the same pinched expression that says “you don’t belong here. ”
I sit at the end of one of the long tables, angled toward the exit, because some habits are permanent.
I see Jonathan coming from forty feet away.
The walk gives him away—that rigid, purposeful stride he uses when he’s decided something is owed to him.
His jaw is already set. His phone is clenched in his right hand.
I close my textbook. Begin packing my bag.
Slow, unhurried, because he will not see me rush. I don’t rush for anyone. Not anymore.
“Catherine.”
“Jon.”
He stops at the edge of my table. Doesn’t sit. Stands over me so I have to tilt my head back to look at him, which is a choice—a power move dressed up as casual conversation.
“We need to talk about this weekend.”
“You mean the weekend you ignored every single one of my calls?” I cross my ankles under the table and fold my hands in my lap. Calm. Contained. Every inch the ice princess he’s been training me to be. “Sure, Jon. Let’s talk.”
His jaw works. I’ve seen this sequence before—the tightening, the controlled exhale through the nose, the slight widening of his stance like he’s bracing for impact.
Jonathan Pennington is a person who believes anger is more effective when it’s performed quietly, and he’s not wrong.
Quiet anger is the kind that makes you watch your step.
I know this from experience. I know this from a man named Jack who never raised his voice until the night he burned my house down.
“Cut the attitude, Catherine. I saw the photo from your mother’s party.”
He holds up his phone. The screen shows the family photo—both families posed in front of the book display, champagne and smiles, the photographer’s flash catching us in that perfectly lit moment of neighborly performance.
But that’s not what Jon’s pointing at. He’s pointing at Kaiden’s hand.
On my hip. Possessive. Unmistakable. Even in a group shot, it looks like a claim.
“That was a family photo,” I say. “Our families are neighbors. There was a photographer. Everyone was in the shot.”
“His hand is on your hip, Catherine.”
“For a photograph.”
“While I wasn’t there.”
And there it is. The real thing, under all the posturing.
Jon isn’t angry that I was photographed with another boy.
Jon is angry that I did something without his permission, in his absence, where he couldn’t control the narrative.
This has never been about Kaiden. This is about ownership. It’s always been about ownership.
Something in me stills. Clarifies. The way a lens focuses and suddenly everything is sharp.
I stand. The dining hall has gone quiet around us—the gradual, conspicuous silence of a hundred teenagers pretending not to watch while recording on their phones.
“You weren’t there because you chose not to come,” I say, and my voice carries farther than I intend, but I don’t pull it back.
Let them hear. “You called my mother’s career milestone a ‘silly book club.’ You didn’t pick up when I called.
You didn’t return a single message. So no, Jon.
You don’t get to stand here and act wounded because I existed in your absence. ”
His face changes. The quiet anger cracks, and something uglier surfaces—the raw, unperformed kind. The kind that doesn’t calculate its audience. The kind I’ve seen before, on a different face, in a different house, in a life I was supposed to have left behind.
“Are you sleeping with him?”
I almost laugh. The question is so predictable, so reductive, so precisely the accusation a person like Jonathan Pennington would reach for when his control is slipping. Every controlling man I’ve ever known defaults to the same script. It’s almost boring.
“No, Jon. I’m not sleeping with Kaiden.” I hitch my bag onto my shoulder. “But I think you already know that. I think this is about something else entirely. And I think—” I meet his eyes. Steady. Final. “This is over.”
The slap comes faster than I expect.
Open palm. Right side of my face. Hard enough to turn my head and send a bright, white flash behind my eyes.
The sound of it—the sharp, flat crack of skin on skin—fills the silent dining hall like a gunshot.
A girl three tables away gasps. Somebody drops a fork. The room holds its collective breath.
My cheek burns. My ear rings. My vision whites out for a fraction of a second before snapping back into focus. I don’t touch my face. I don’t step back. I don’t give him a single fucking inch.
I let the sting radiate through my skull and I look at Jonathan Pennington with absolute, unblinking clarity. The same clarity I felt when I picked up a .38 revolver and pointed it at the chest of a man who’d spent six years destroying me.
I have been hit by worse. I have been hurt by hands that make Jon’s look like a child playing pretend.
This slap is nothing—a gust of wind against a sea wall built to withstand hurricanes.
But it is also everything, because it is proof.
Proof of every red flag I cataloged and dismissed.
Every too-tight grip I rationalized. Every time I whispered “he’s not like that” into the dark of my own bedroom while pressing my thumbnail into my finger to stay anchored.
He is exactly like that. He’s just smaller. A lesser predator pretending to be apex.
“You are mine, Catherine.” His voice is shaking. Unraveled. The mask completely gone. “Not his. Mine.”
I look at him the way I looked at a man in a burning hallway when I was seventeen years old. Without fear. Without hesitation. With the total, annihilating calm of a person who has already survived the worst thing that will ever happen to her.
“I am nobody’s.”
The three words land like stones dropped into still water. The dining hall is so quiet I can hear the clock on the wall ticking.
I turn and walk out. Behind me, Jon’s voice cracks open into something shrill and ugly: “You are nothing without me! I got you into this school, and I can take you out! You hear me, Catherine? You’re nothing!”
The words hit the back of my head and slide off. Rain on glass. I’ve been called nothing by men who meant it more, and I’m still here.
In the hallway, I breathe. The fluorescent lights hum their constant, indifferent hum. My cheek throbs in time with my pulse—a hot, rhythmic reminder that I just blew up the only safe thing in my life, even though it was never actually safe at all.
I press my fingertips to my cheek. Feel the heat. Drop my hand.
Keep walking. You’re okay. You’ve survived worse. Keep walking.
I find Penny in the library. She’s in our usual spot—the back corner, feet propped on the table, headphones drowning out the world, a graphic novel spread open in her lap.
She’s the picture of a girl who has decided that the rules of Edgewood Preparatory Academy apply to everyone except her, and I love her for it.
She pulls an earbud out when she sees me. Her eyes go to my cheek first, then to my eyes, then back to my cheek. Her expression shifts through about four emotions in two seconds—surprise, fury, concern, and a cold, sharp thing that doesn’t have a name but looks a lot like violence.
“Cat.” She sits up. “Your cheek.”
I sit down across from her and take the other earbud without asking. Ashes of the Kings floods my skull—screaming vocals, shredded guitars, the kind of sound that fills every empty space in your head and leaves no room for the thoughts that want to eat you alive.
“Broke up with Jon,” I say.
“And he hit you.” Not a question. Penny doesn’t waste time on questions she already knows the answers to.
“Slapped. In the dining hall. In front of the entire school. I’m sure it’s already on six different social media accounts.”
Penny’s hands go flat on the table. She presses them down hard enough that her knuckles whiten, and I recognize the posture because I’ve used it myself—it’s the posture of a person physically preventing themselves from doing something they’ll regret. Or enjoy. Or both.
“How hard?” she asks. Her voice is low. Controlled. Dangerous.
“Hard enough to turn my head. Not hard enough to matter.”
“Everything that leaves a mark matters, Cat.”
I shrug. “He hits like a child. Genuinely. If I ranked the impacts my face has received in my lifetime, Jon Pennington wouldn’t even crack the top ten.”
I mean it as dark humor. The kind I use to keep the real things at a distance.
But Penny’s expression doesn’t shift into amusement.
Instead, something crosses her face—a question she wants to ask, a door she can see at the end of a hallway she isn’t sure she’s invited down.
She looks at me for a long beat. Then she lets it go.
Doesn’t push. Files it away the same way I file things—quietly, carefully, in the place where the heavy things live.
“I’m going to make his life very, very unpleasant,” she says.
“Get in line.”
“No, Cat. I’m serious. I’m going to make it my personal mission to ensure Jonathan Pennington does not have a single comfortable moment for the rest of his senior year.
He’s going to wake up every morning wondering what Penny MacHale has planned for him today, and the answer is always going to be ‘something worse than yesterday.’”
I look at her. She’s not joking. There’s something in her eyes that tells me Penny has been waiting for a reason to go to war with the Penningtons for a long time, and I just handed her one.
“Why do you care this much?” I ask. “You’ve known me for a week.”