Chapter 10 - Catherine #2
“Somebody planted a camera,” he continues. “In my house. Pointed at the room where you were sleeping. And I think it was Pennington. I think he broke into your house yesterday not to scare you but to follow you to mine. I think he planted the camera before we even knew you were coming.”
My hands are shaking. I press them against my thighs. “Why should I believe you.”
“Because I’m standing in your bedroom at two in the morning looking like I haven’t slept because I haven’t.
Because I knocked on your front door for thirty minutes before I used the code, and the entire time I was standing out there, the only thing in my head was the image of you—” His voice breaks.
Actually breaks. A fracture in the middle of a word that he can’t smooth over.
“—was the image of you in a tub somewhere because of what somebody did to you in my house. On my watch. While I was right fucking there.”
The room is dark except for the streetlight through the curtains. His face is half in shadow. His eyes are red-rimmed and raw.
“You think I care about winning some game?” he says.
“You think I give a shit about being king of some prep school after what you said to me last night? You asked me to kill you, Cat. You looked at me and said ‘put me out of my misery’ with the same voice you’d use to order a fucking coffee.
That’s what I’m standing here about. Not the photos. Not Pennington. You.”
I don’t speak. Can’t. My throat is closed. My chest is tight. My body is doing the thing it does when the walls get breached—going still, going small, preparing for impact.
“Who’s Jack?” he asks. Quiet. Not demanding. Asking.
“That’s none of your—”
“You screamed his name in your sleep. You begged him not to hurt your mother. You said ‘I won’t tell.’ You said it in a voice that sounded like a little girl, Cat. Not seventeen. Younger. Much younger.”
My legs give out. I sit on the edge of the bed because standing is no longer something my body is willing to do. Kaiden doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t touch me. Just stands in my doorway and waits.
“You need to leave,” I say. But there’s no force behind it. The command is a reflex, and we both know it.
“Tell me,” he says. “Not because I’m demanding it. Not because I’m going to use it. Tell me because you’ve been carrying this by yourself for years and it’s killing you. I can see it killing you. I’ve been watching it kill you since the day you walked through that archway.”
“You don’t get to know this about me, Kaiden. You haven’t earned—”
“You’re right. I haven’t earned it. I’ve done nothing to earn it. I’ve been cruel to you. I’ve pulled your hair and grabbed your throat and posted pictures and played games with your life like it was mine to play with. I know that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
He steps into the room. One step. Stops.
“But I’m here. At two in the morning. Because I can’t sleep.
Because every time I close my eyes I hear you saying ‘put me out of my misery’ and I feel sick.
And I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know how to fix anything.
But I’m here, and I’m not leaving until you either call the cops or you tell me what happened to you. One or the other.”
The room is so quiet I can hear the clock on my nightstand. Tick. Tick. Tick.
I look at Kaiden Monaghan. My bully. My tormentor.
The boy who held me while I slept and whose shirt I breathed in like oxygen.
The boy who wrapped his hand around my throat and the boy who put his thumb on my spine and kept me from falling apart.
The worst and best thing that’s happened to me at Edgewood, and I can’t tell the difference between the two anymore.
I should tell him to leave. Every rational circuit in my brain is screaming at me to tell him to leave.
Instead I say: “Sit down.”
He sits. On the floor. Not the bed. Like he knows the bed would be too much. He leans against the wall opposite me, long legs stretched out, hands in his lap, and he waits.
“There was a man,” I say. “In our old town. He ran a book club at the community center.”
My voice is flat. Clinical. The voice I use with therapists and detectives and the parade of professionals who’ve asked me to recount this story in various offices over the past two years. The voice that keeps the feelings at arm’s length so I can get the words out without drowning.
“I was twelve. My parents were busy—my dad was building his career, my mom was writing. I was alone a lot. The book club was the first place where somebody paid attention to me.”
I stop. Breathe. Kaiden doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move.
“He started slow. Asked me to stay late to help pick books. Gave me praise. Told me I was mature for my age. Bought me things. Held my hand.”
The words sound so small. So ordinary. That’s the thing about grooming—it doesn’t announce itself. It whispers. It wears the face of kindness until the mask comes off and by then you’re so deep inside the trap that you can’t see the walls anymore.
“Then it wasn’t just holding hands,” I say. “Then it was touching. Then he drugged me and it was—”
I stop. The word sits in my throat like a stone. I’ve said it before. In offices. In therapy. In the careful, sterile language of police reports. But saying it here, in my bedroom, in the dark, to a boy sitting on my floor—
“He raped me.”
The words fall into the silence like something dropped from a great height. I hear Kaiden’s breathing change. A sharp intake. Then nothing. Held.
“I was twelve,” I repeat. Because the number matters. Because it needs to sit in the room and be felt.
“He took pictures. Used them to keep me quiet. Told me he’d ruin my parents if I talked.
So I didn’t talk. For years, Kaiden. I didn’t say a single word to anyone.
I just…went back. Every time he called, I went back.
Because he told me if I didn’t, he’d move on to other girls.
Younger girls. And I believed him. So I traded myself. ”
My voice cracks. I seal it. Keep going.
“I started cutting at fourteen. My parents found out two years later. Sent me to a facility for a year. They thought it was depression. Anxiety. Normal teenage darkness. They didn’t know. I couldn’t—I couldn’t tell them. He said he’d kill them. I believed that too.”
Kaiden makes a sound. Low. Guttural. The sound of a person processing something their body is rejecting.
“When I came home, he was waiting. Picked up right where he left off. But I was seventeen by then. I looked different. Older. He was…losing interest. Starting to look at younger girls again.”
I’m gripping my own knees so hard my fingers ache. I can feel the tremor starting—the one that begins in my hands and works its way through my whole body when the memories get too close to the surface.
“I walked in on him with another girl. She was maybe eleven. And something—” I swallow. “Something in me just…broke. The right kind of broke. The kind that makes you stop being afraid and start being furious. I attacked him. Got the girl out. Went straight home and told my parents everything.”
“They called the police?” Kaiden’s voice is rough. Barely there.
“They tried. But he was a ‘community leader.’ Respected. Beloved. People looked at us like I was the liar. Like I was the teenage seductress who ruined a good man’s life.” I laugh. It sounds like glass breaking. “Twelve. I was twelve when it started, and people looked at me like I asked for it.”
Silence. Long. Heavy.
“He came to our house,” I say. “The night of the fire. He broke in. He was going to kill all of us. My dad fought him. My mom shoved a gun in my hand and told me to hide.”
I’m shaking now. Full-body. The kind of tremor that comes from the deep places—not cold, not fear, but the physical memory of a night that lives in my muscles and my bones and the places where trauma stores itself like radiation.
“He set the house on fire. I got my parents out. But a beam fell on me. That’s where the burns come from. The ones everybody saw today.”
“And him?” Kaiden’s voice is a whisper. “The man.”
I look at Kaiden. At his face in the dark—the shadows under his eyes, the set of his jaw, the way his hands are fisted in his lap like he’s holding something down.
“I killed him,” I say. “Three shots. Two in the chest. One in the head. With my father’s .38 revolver. I was seventeen years old.”
The room stops. Time stops. Everything stops except the clock on the nightstand, which keeps ticking because clocks don’t care about the weight of what’s been said in their presence.
Kaiden stares at me. Not with horror. Not with pity. With something I don’t have a name for—something between devastation and awe, like he’s looking at a person who walked through a fire and came out the other side and is still standing and he can’t understand how.
“So that’s the darkness,” I say. My voice is steady now.
Emptied. The confession has drained something out of me and what’s left is just…
quiet. “That’s what’s behind the ice. I have blood on my hands.
I killed a man in my parents’ kitchen and I didn’t cry when I did it.
I pointed the gun and I pulled the trigger three times and I felt nothing.
Nothing, Kaiden. What kind of person feels nothing? ”
He moves. Not fast—slow, deliberate, crossing the space between the wall and the bed on his knees. He stops in front of me. Looks up. His face is wet. I realize, with a shock that feels almost physical, that Kaiden Monaghan is crying.
Not performing. Not strategic. Tears running silent and unchecked down his face while his jaw stays locked and his body stays rigid—the crying of a person who has spent years learning not to, whose body is doing it anyway, against his will.
He takes my hands. Holds them. Presses them between his palms like something he’s afraid will break.
“The kind of person who was twelve when a grown man started raping her,” he says.
His voice is destroyed. “The kind who spent four years protecting other girls with her own body. The kind who saved her parents from a burning house and killed the person trying to destroy her family. That’s the kind of person who feels nothing when she pulls the trigger, Cat.
The kind who’s been so fucking brave for so long she’s forgotten that she was a child when it started and none of it was her fault. ”
Something inside me gives way. Not the walls. The walls are still there—they’ll always be there. But somewhere behind them, a door opens. A door I didn’t know existed, leading to a room I sealed shut years ago and swore I’d never enter again.
I cry.
Not the controlled, quiet tears I allow myself in the dark.
Not the furious tears from the kitchen fight.
Something deeper. Something older. The crying of a twelve-year-old girl who was too afraid to make a sound in a room where a man was hurting her, who held it all in for years and years and years, and is now, in a dark bedroom in Edgewood, Massachusetts, with a boy she doesn’t trust holding her hands and tears on his face, finally letting it out.
It’s ugly. It’s loud. It’s the kind of crying that comes from the bottom of the ocean.
Kaiden pulls me off the bed and into his arms. I resist for about half a second before the fight goes out of me entirely and I collapse against his chest and I hold onto him the way you hold onto something in a flood—desperately, with everything, because the alternative is being swept away.
He holds me on the floor of my bedroom and doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t shush me. Doesn’t tell me it’s going to be okay. Just holds on, his arms locked around me, his chin on the top of my head, and lets me break.
I don’t know how long it lasts. Minutes. Hours. Time doesn’t exist when you’re purging something you’ve carried for half your life.
When it slows—when the sobs become hiccups and the hiccups become shuddering breaths and the breaths become something approaching normal—I pull back. Look at him. His shirt is soaked. His eyes are swollen. He looks as destroyed as I feel.
“Don’t say sorry,” I whisper. “Please. I can’t hear it again.”
“I wasn’t going to.” He pushes the hair off my face.
His fingers are gentle. Shaking. “I was going to say that you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.
And I was going to say that I’m going to find out who planted that camera.
And I was going to say that nobody is ever going to use your scars against you again. Not while I’m breathing.”
“That’s a lot of saying for someone who told me not to say anything.”
A ghost of a smile. His. Mine. Both of us too wrecked for anything more. He stands. Pulls me up. Walks me to the bed and waits while I climb in.
“Stay,” I say.
I don’t know where the word comes from. It bypasses every defense, every wall, every rational thought I’ve ever had about this boy.
It comes from the place behind the door—the room I just opened—the place where the twelve-year-old girl lives who has never once, in her entire life, asked someone to stay.
Kaiden looks at me. At the bed. At me again. He takes off his shoes. Lies down beside me. On top of the covers, not under them—a boundary that neither of us discusses but both of us understand.
I turn onto my side. He curves around me. His arm settles over my waist. His chest against my back. His breath on my neck.
“Kaiden.”
“Yeah.”
“If you tell anyone what I told you tonight—”
“I won’t.”
“If you use it against me—”
“I’d rather you shoot me.”
The silence settles around us like snow. His hand finds mine. Our fingers lace together against my stomach.
“Who could ever love a murderer, Kaiden?” I whisper.
He’s quiet for a long time. I think he’s not going to answer. Then, into the dark, against the back of my neck: “Somebody who understands what it costs to survive.”
I close my eyes. His arm tightens around me. The clock ticks. The house settles.
And for the second night in a row, I fall asleep in the arms of a boy I don’t trust, wearing the scars I’ve spent my life hiding, having given away the secret that could destroy everything.
And I’m not afraid. For the first time in five years, I’m not afraid.