Chapter 8 - Catherine
The police officer is asking me to describe the condition of the front door when I arrived, and I’m answering in complete sentences with appropriate detail because that’s what you do when authorities ask you questions. You stay calm. You stay specific. You give them what they need and nothing more.
I learned this at twelve. How to sit across from a detective and describe things no child should have to describe, in a voice so steady that the officer kept glancing at my mother like he was checking whether I was medicated.
I wasn’t. I was just good at this. Some kids are good at soccer. I’m good at crisis.
“The door was open approximately six inches when I arrived,” I say. “The lock plate was cracked. No signs of anyone still inside, but I didn’t go past the foyer. I came directly here.”
Kaiden is at the table. He hasn’t moved since I sat down. Hasn’t spoken. Just sits there with his arms folded and his eyes on me, steady and unblinking, like he’s afraid that if he looks away I’ll disappear. It should be irritating. It’s not. I don’t examine why.
The front door opens. I hear it before I see it—the slam, the rush of footsteps, the particular panicked rhythm of two people who’ve been driving too fast and imagining the worst.
My father reaches me first. He comes through the kitchen doorway and his face—God, his face. He looks like he did the night of the fire. Grey. Hollowed out. The expression of a man reliving the worst moment of his life and discovering it isn’t over.
He wraps his arms around me so hard it hurts, and I let him, because right now my father needs to hold his daughter more than I need to breathe.
“Oh God, Cat. Oh my God.” His voice breaks on my name. His hands are shaking against my back. “We got here as fast as we could. Are you hurt? Did anyone—are you—”
“I’m okay, Daddy. I’m fine. The door was open, that’s all. Nobody was inside.”
My mother is right behind him. She’s been crying in the car—I can see it in the mascara tracked beneath her eyes, the way she’s gripping her purse strap like a lifeline.
She reaches for my face and cups my cheeks with both hands, tilting my head, checking me the way she used to check me after the fire, after the hospital, after every nightmare she walked into my room to find me screaming through.
“Baby,” she whispers. “Your face. What happened to your face?”
The bruise. Right. I’d forgotten about Jon’s parting gift. It must be deep purple by now.
“It’s nothing, Mom.”
“That is not nothing. Thomas—look at her face.”
My father pulls back. Sees the bruise. His expression goes from terrified to something else entirely—something quiet and lethal that I’ve only seen once before, the night he fought Jack on our kitchen floor.
The police officer clears his throat. “The door was forced open, Mr. O’Farrell. We’re looking into it. Can you tell me—is there anyone who might have reason to target your family?”
My father is still staring at my cheek. He hasn’t blinked.
“We just moved here,” he says, his voice flat. “Who would want to hurt us?”
From the table, Kaiden says one word: “Pennington.”
I glare at him. He holds my gaze without flinching.
My father turns to me. “Did that boy hurt you, Catherine?” He’s using my full name. He only does that when he’s trying very hard to stay controlled. “If he’s been threatening you—if he did this to your face—you need to tell us. Right now.”
“It’s handled, Daddy. I ended it. It’s over.”
“Show them your arm, Cat.”
Kaiden. Again. I turn on him with enough heat to melt steel, but he doesn’t back down. Just looks at me with that infuriating steadiness, like he’s decided this is happening whether I want it to or not.
“Stop,” I say. Low. A warning.
“No.”
My father is already reaching for my hand. Gently—always gently, because my father has known since the fire that gentle is the only way to approach me—he turns my wrist over and pushes my sleeve up.
The bruises come first. Jon’s fingerprints, stamped into my skin in shades of purple and yellow. My father’s breath catches.
Then the scars.
They sit beneath the bruises like a map nobody was supposed to see. Thin, parallel, deliberate. Some faded to silver. Some newer. Pink. The evidence of every night the pressure won.
The kitchen goes silent. The kind of silence that has weight—that presses down on your chest and makes the air feel thick.
My mother’s hand flies to her mouth. My father doesn’t move.
Just stares at my wrist with an expression that’s crumbling in real time, piece by piece, like watching a building come down from the inside.
My ears start to ring. My cheeks burn. The room is too bright, too full, too many eyes on the thing I’ve spent months hiding under long sleeves and carefully angled arms.
Don’t pass out. Don’t run. Stay in your body. Stay here.
A hand settles on my lower back. Warm. Steady. Not grabbing, not pulling—just there. Kaiden. He doesn’t say anything. His thumb moves in a slow circle against my spine, and the rhythm of it—predictable, consistent, grounding—pulls me back from the edge of the spiral like an anchor catching hold.
I hate that it works. I hate that his touch is the thing that keeps me in this room. I hate it and I lean into it anyway, because my options are his hand or the floor, and I choose his hand.
My mother looks up at me. Tears running. “Catherine…”
“There’s no point in staring.” My voice comes out flat. Controlled. The voice I’ve been trained to use—by therapists, by experience, by the simple necessity of being the calmest person in every crisis I’ve ever been in. “We’re not here about those. We’re here about the door.”
My father’s face has gone dark red. A vein pulses at his temple. When he speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper, which is how I know he’s at the very edge of his control.
“I’m going to kill that boy.”
The officer shifts his weight. “We’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, sir.” He pauses. “I have a daughter too. Believe me, I understand. Who’s the boy?”
“Jonathan Pennington,” Kaiden says before I can stop him.
The officer’s pen stops. He looks up. “Pennington. Right.” Something crosses his face that tells me this isn’t the first time he’s heard the name in a professional context. “We’ll look into him. Miss O’Farrell, would you like to press charges for the assault?”
“No.”
Every person in the room reacts. My father exhales sharply. My mother shakes her head. Kaiden’s hand stills on my back.
“It’s not worth the process,” I say. “I just want this to be over.”
The officer nods, but he holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary. “If you change your mind, here’s my card. And for the record, Miss O’Farrell—filing a report is always worth it. Even if nothing comes of it, it’s on the record. Records matter.”
I take the card. Slip it into my pocket. Records matter. He’s right about that. My entire life is shaped by what was and wasn’t recorded.
My father sits at the table and puts his face in his hands. My mother stands behind him with her hand on his shoulder, and they look, in this moment, like exactly what they are: two parents who thought they’d kept their daughter safe and are discovering, in a neighbor’s kitchen, that they failed.
They didn’t fail. They couldn’t have known. But explaining that would require explaining everything I’ve been hiding, and I’m not ready for that conversation. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.
“I thought they were our friends,” my father says, voice muffled by his palms. “The Penningtons. His father helped us with everything—the move, the school, the introduction to the community.”
Callum Monaghan appears in the doorway. He’s been listening—I can tell by his posture, the way his eyes move across the room and take inventory before he speaks.
Kaiden’s father is a politician to his bones, but he’s not performing right now.
His expression is genuine, and what it holds is something closer to recognition than sympathy.
“That’s how families like the Penningtons operate,” he says.
“They invest in people until they own them. And when the investment stops paying dividends, they show you who they really are.” He turns to me.
“For what it’s worth, Cat—your spot at Edgewood has nothing to do with the Penningtons.
I sit on the board. I saw your test scores and your transcripts. You’re there because you earned it.”
Something tight in my chest releases. Not all of it. But enough. Jon’s threat—“I got you in and I can take you out”—has been sitting in my ribcage like a splinter since yesterday, and Callum Monaghan just pulled it free.
My mother sighs. My father lifts his face from his hands. The officer clicks his pen.
“Mr. O’Farrell, if you can walk me through the house and identify whether anything is missing, that would be helpful.”
Saoirse—Kaiden’s mother—steps forward. “Thomas, go with the officer. Fiona, stay with me. We’ll sort dinner.
” She turns to my mother with the particular authority of a woman who has managed a household, a husband’s political career, and a difficult son with equal competence.
“You’re all staying here tonight. Callum’s people will install a security system at your house tomorrow. ”
My mother nods. She’s in no condition to argue. Neither is my father, who follows the officer out the door with the hollow, mechanical walk of a man running on adrenaline and nothing else.
Kaiden’s hand leaves my back. The absence of it is immediate and disorienting—like stepping out of a warm building into cold air.
Callum looks between Kaiden and me. “Why don’t you two go study or something. Let the adults deal with the rest.”
My mother—three glasses of wine deep and running on fear—actually gives me a small push toward the hallway. “Go, baby. We’ll handle this.”