Chapter 8 - Catherine #2
I don’t want to go. I want to stay in this kitchen where the light is warm and the adults are handling things and I can pretend, for five more minutes, that I’m not the one who’s been managing my own crises since I was old enough to understand that nobody else could.
But I go. Because that’s what I do. I go where I’m pointed and I adapt and I survive.
Kaiden walks me upstairs. The hallway is dim—sconce lighting, hardwood floors, the old-money quiet of a house that was built to absorb sound.
He opens a door. “Guest room. You’re right next to me.” He says it simply. No innuendo. No smirk. Just information.
I step inside. The room is clean, neutral—cream walls, a queen bed with a white duvet, a window overlooking the garden.
My garden. I can see my own house from here, the lights the police left on when they went through it, and the sight of my home lit up like a crime scene makes something in my chest squeeze.
Kaiden is still in the doorway. I can feel him there—that particular weight his presence has, like gravity with a personality.
“Don’t touch me right now,” I say without turning around. “I’m not in the mood for…whatever you are.”
I expect the laugh. The flirtation. The “I’m just here to study” line delivered with that crooked smile that makes my body do things my brain objects to.
Instead, he’s quiet. I turn. He’s leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, and the expression on his face is one I haven’t seen before. Not the smirk. Not the predator. Not the king of Edgewood performing his dominance.
He looks…uncertain. Like he walked into a room and realized he doesn’t know the rules.
“I’ll grab you some clothes,” he says. “And my calc textbook. Unless you want to be alone.”
I should want to be alone. Alone is my default. Alone is safe. Alone is where nobody can see the cracks.
“Bring the textbook,” I hear myself say.
He nods. Disappears down the hall. Comes back a few minutes later with a stack—grey sweatpants, a faded Edgewood Prep lacrosse shirt, his calc textbook, and two pencils. He sets everything on the bed. Doesn’t enter the room.
“I’ll be next door,” he says. Then he closes the door behind him. Quietly.
I stand in the middle of the guest room and stare at the clothes on the bed and try to figure out why the absence of his usual bullshit feels more disorienting than the bullshit itself.
I sit on the bed. Open the textbook. Stare at derivatives without processing a single one. After ten minutes, I walk to his door and knock. He opens it immediately—like he was standing right there, waiting.
“I can’t concentrate in there by myself.”
He steps aside. I walk in. His room is not what I expect.
No trophies displayed. No posters of half-naked women.
Bookshelves—actual bookshelves—lined with a mix of novels, political biographies, and a few titles I recognize from my own shelves.
A desk covered in neat stacks of paper. The lacrosse stick leaning in the corner. The bed is made.
I sit on the floor with my back against his bed frame because the floor feels more temporary than the bed, and temporary is what I need right now. He sits on the opposite side with his own textbook, and for a while we just work. Quiet. The scratch of pencils. The occasional turning of pages.
It’s the most peaceful twenty minutes I’ve had in days.
Dinner is worse.
Both families at the Monaghans’ dining table. Saoirse and my mother have cooked something elaborate—chicken, roasted vegetables, bread. The food is good. Nobody is eating.
My father is on his fourth glass of wine. He stares at his plate with the unfocused intensity of a man whose thoughts are somewhere violent.
“I can’t believe they fooled us,” he says. “The boy was always polite. Cold, but polite. His father was so generous during the move—”
Callum sets his fork down. “The Penningtons are very good at being generous until it costs them something. Then you see who they actually are.”
My mother takes a long sip of wine. “I never liked him. There was always something…off. Too controlled for a boy his age. Too watchful.”
She’s describing Jon the way you’d describe a predator in a nature documentary. She’s not wrong. But she’s also describing it from the safe distance of hindsight, and I want to ask where this instinct was six months ago when she encouraged me to date him.
I don’t ask. I push chicken around my plate and count the seconds until this conversation ends.
“Cat should be focusing on school, not boys,” my mother continues. “We thought he came from a good family. We thought—”
I put my fork down. Not a slam. Just a placement. Deliberate. Controlled. The sound of silverware meeting porcelain in a quiet room. “Can we talk about something else.”
It’s not a question. My father looks up. My mother’s mouth opens. “Catherine, don’t use that tone—”
Kaiden clears his throat. Both tables turn to him.
“She’s right,” he says. Casual. Like he’s commenting on the weather. “It can’t be great sitting here listening to everyone dissect the worst day of your life. She asked for a subject change. That seems reasonable.”
My parents stare at him. His parents don’t. Saoirse hides a small smile behind her wine glass. Callum just nods once, like a man who’s seen his son do something unexpectedly right and is choosing not to make a thing of it.
Kaiden pivots the conversation to lacrosse. To my class ranking. To something Callum said about the upcoming zoning vote. He does it smoothly—effortlessly—the way a person does when they’ve grown up at dinner tables where conversation is a performance and redirection is a survival skill.
I eat three more bites. Then I pick up my plate, carry it to the kitchen, and set it in the sink. I grip the edge of the counter and breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The effort of keeping it together—of being the calm one, the steady one, the adult in a room full of adults who are more shaken than I am—is costing me things I don’t have to spare. I can feel the reserves emptying. The walls thinning. Whatever I’ve been running on all day is almost gone.
Footsteps behind me. I straighten. Turn. It’s both of my parents, and the expressions on their faces tell me exactly what’s coming.
“Catherine.” My mother’s voice is careful. Too careful. The voice you use when you’re approaching something fragile. “We need to talk about your wrist.”
“No, we don’t.”
She takes my hand anyway. Turns it over. Runs her thumb across the scars the way you’d run your fingers over a crack in something precious, trying to gauge how deep the damage goes.
I pull away. “Nothing.”
My father’s face collapses. Not anger—not like the dining hall, not like the officer. This is something worse. This is the face of a man who carried his daughter out of a burning house and thought he’d saved her, and is now learning that the fire followed her out.
“Baby,” he says. His voice cracks clean in half. “We thought you were doing better. The therapy. The medication. You seemed—you were smiling. You had friends.”
Something breaks in me. Not loudly. Not dramatically. A quiet, structural failure—a load-bearing wall giving way inside a building that’s been standing on willpower alone.
“You thought I was doing better,” I repeat. “You thought that because I was performing ‘better.’ Because that’s what we do. We perform. We show the world the version of this family that’s polished and healed and moved on, and we never—not once—talk about what actually happened.”
“Catherine—”
“The medication makes me feel dead. Not sad, not happy—dead. Like I’m watching my own life through a window.
And the therapy? The therapy is a performance too, because we can’t actually talk about the real things in therapy because the real things are sealed in a file somewhere and if they get out, it ruins Daddy’s campaign. ”
My voice is getting louder. I don’t try to stop it.
“You buried everything. Both of you. You buried what Jack did like it was a PR problem instead of—instead of the thing that destroyed your daughter. You went to therapy with me and sat there and nodded and said all the right words, and then we came home and you never mentioned it again. Not once. Like if we don’t say it out loud, it didn’t happen. ”
My mother’s face is red. Her hands are shaking. “You will not raise your voice at me. Especially in someone else’s home.”
And there it is. The instinct. Even now—even with her daughter’s scars still visible under the kitchen light—the first concern is appearances. Not what I’m saying. That someone might hear me saying it.
“That’s exactly my point, Mom.” I’m not yelling anymore.
My voice has gone quiet. Deadly quiet. The calm after the calm—the place I go when I’ve run out of energy for anger and what’s left is just truth.
“What matters more to you? My health, or how it looks? Because you can’t have both.
You’ve been choosing ‘how it looks’ for two years, and this—” I hold up my wrist. The scars catch the light. “This is what that choice costs.”
Silence. The kind that follows a detonation.
My father is crying. Quietly. Hands at his sides. Not wiping the tears, like he thinks he doesn’t have the right to grieve in front of me.
My mother looks like I’ve slapped her. Which is ironic, given the day I’ve had.
I don’t wait for a response. I walk out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the guest room. Close the door. Don’t slam it. I never slam doors. Slamming is for people who still have something left to spend on drama. I have nothing left.
I stand in the middle of the room and wait for the shaking to stop.
It doesn’t stop. My hands first. Then my arms. Then my whole body—a fine, relentless tremor that makes my teeth chatter and my vision blur.
The walls are too close. The ceiling is too low.
My heartbeat fills my skull with a rapid, arrhythmic pounding that doesn’t sound like a heartbeat at all.
It sounds like footsteps coming up the stairs.
You’re not there. You’re not in that house. The fire is out. He’s dead. You’re safe.
I’m not safe. I’m never safe. Safety is a concept designed for people whose bodies haven’t memorized the chemical signature of their own terror.
I open the dresser drawers. One by one. Looking for something. Anything. A razor. Scissors. A nail file. A safety pin. The specificity of the search is its own kind of horror—how practiced it is, how automatic, how my hands know exactly what shape they’re looking for before my brain has caught up.
Empty. Empty. Empty. Every drawer cleaned out. Every surface bare.
I check the bathroom. Medicine cabinet: empty. Vanity drawers: empty. The shower has a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo and nothing else.
I slam my palms against the counter. The sound rings off the tile.
I look up into the mirror and see a girl I barely recognize—eyes dilated and rimmed red, cheeks blotchy, mascara smeared, hair sticking to her damp forehead.
She looks feral. Unraveled. She looks like someone who has been holding the world together with her fingernails and just felt them snap.
The drawers are empty because someone made them empty. Someone thought about what a person in crisis might look for and removed it before they could find it. That kind of foresight doesn’t come from a safety manual. It comes from experience.
I wash my face. Cold water. Brutal and clarifying. I dry off with a towel that smells like expensive detergent and go back into the bedroom.
The clothes Kaiden left are still on the bed. Grey sweatpants. The faded lacrosse shirt.
I strip off my uniform. Pull on his sweats. They’re too long, pooling at my ankles, the drawstring cinched as tight as it goes. The shirt hangs past my hips. It’s soft—washed a hundred times, the cotton thinned to the point of translucence.
It smells like him. Cedar. Something clean and sharp—peppermint, maybe.
And underneath it, something warm and unnameable that my body recognizes before my brain does.
The same scent that surrounded me in the garden when his hand was on my back and his mouth was at my ear and I couldn’t tell the difference between wanting to run and wanting to stay.
I pull the collar up over my nose and breathe in. Deep. Once. Twice.
The trembling slows.
I don’t understand why. I don’t understand how the scent of a boy who’s spent the last two weeks tormenting me can be the thing that quiets the noise in my head.
It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to.
My body has never been interested in what makes sense.
My body runs on a operating system that was corrupted years ago, and it does what it does, and I’ve learned to stop fighting it and just survive the aftermath.
I crawl into bed. Pull the duvet up to my chin. The sheets are cool and clean and someone else’s, and there’s something both comforting and devastating about lying in a bed that doesn’t know my nightmares.
Through the wall, I hear movement. A creak of bedsprings. The soft thud of a textbook being set down. Kaiden, in his room, on the other side of the plaster.
He’s right there. Six inches of wall between us.
I close my eyes. The cedar-and-peppermint scent wraps around me like arms I didn’t ask for and can’t push away. My body relaxes in increments—muscles unclenching one at a time, jaw loosening, hands going slack against the sheets.
The last thought I have before sleep takes me isn’t about Jon, or the door, or my parents’ faces, or the scars on my wrist.
It’s about the way Kaiden’s hand felt on my back in the kitchen. The slow circle of his thumb against my spine. The way it kept me in my body when every instinct I have was screaming to leave it.
I hate him for that. For being the thing that grounds me. For being dangerous and terrible and cruel and also, somehow, inexplicably, the person whose shirt I’m wearing while I fall asleep in his house.
I fall asleep hating him. And wearing his clothes. And breathing him in with every exhale.
And it’s the best I’ve slept in weeks.