Chapter 11 - Kaiden #4
“Kaid,” Iz says. “Whatever you shared with her—that’s yours. But please tell me you’re talking to someone. Not just her. Someone who can actually—”
“My dad told me to call Dr. Reeves.”
“Are you going to?”
“Yeah. I’m going to.”
He nods. That’s enough. The room settles back into its heavy silence, five boys sitting with the weight of things that are too big for any of them, and for once, nobody pretends otherwise.
My phone rings. My father’s name on the screen.
“Kaiden. Come home. Now.”
The call ends. Three seconds. No warmth. No question.
I look at the boys. “I gotta go.”
Iz catches my arm as I pass. “Whatever happens, we’re here.”
I nod. Head for the door. Get in the Skyline. Drive home on autopilot, the engine filling the car with its low roar, and my hands grip the wheel so tight the leather creaks.
My father is in the kitchen. Standing. Not sitting—standing. Arms at his sides. My mother is nowhere in sight, which means she’s been asked to leave the room, which means this is going to be bad.
“Sit down.”
I sit. He doesn’t sit. He paces. Three steps one way, three steps back. The politician is completely absent—no composure, no strategic framing, no measured delivery. What’s left is a man. A father. Furious and terrified in equal measure.
“Thomas O’Farrell called me at six this morning.” His voice is tight. Controlled. The control of a man who’s been up for four hours deciding how to have this conversation. “He found you in his daughter’s bedroom. At four-thirty in the morning. In her bed.”
“Dad—”
“Don’t.” He holds up his hand. “Don’t ‘dad’ me. Don’t explain. Don’t rationalize. Just listen.”
I shut my mouth.
“Three weeks ago, that girl didn’t exist in your life.
Now her body is all over the internet, someone breached our home security, her ex-boyfriend is escalating, and my son is sneaking into her house in the middle of the night using an emergency code that was designed for actual emergencies.
” He stops pacing. Looks at me. “What the hell is happening, Kaiden?”
“She told me things, Dad. About her past. About what happened to her.”
“What things?”
I hesitate. Cat’s story isn’t mine to tell. But my father is standing in front of me with the expression of a man who is losing his grip on a situation, and I owe him something.
“She was abused. Starting at twelve. A man in their community. It went on for years. The fire—the one that’s sealed in court records—that was him. He came to kill her family. She stopped him.”
My father goes still.
“She killed her abuser,” I say. “At seventeen. To save her parents. And her family has been hiding it ever since.”
He sits down. Slowly. Like the chair might not hold. “Christ.”
“So yeah. I was in her room at four in the morning. Because she told me this, and I couldn’t leave. Because she was crying, and I—”
“Stop.” His voice cracks. Not anger—something else.
He’s looking at me with an expression I’ve seen exactly once before: the night he found me.
The night he carried me out of a van in a parking garage and held me on the pavement while the police surrounded us.
The expression of a parent who knows what has been done to a child and can’t undo it.
“This brought it back for you,” he says. Not a question.
My jaw locks. My hands go to fists on my thighs.
“Kaiden. Look at me.”
I look at him. And something I’ve been holding—for six years, through thousands of hours of therapy and lacrosse and cruelty and the meticulous construction of a person who never shows weakness—starts to give way.
“She was saying the same things,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound right. “In her nightmare the other night. The same words I used. ‘Please don’t. I’ll be good. I won’t tell.’ And I was lying there hearing it through the wall and I couldn’t—I couldn’t just—”
My hands are shaking. My vision blurs. I press my palms against my eyes because I am not going to cry in my father’s kitchen. I am Kaiden Monaghan. I am the king of Edgewood Prep. I do not break down.
My father’s chair scrapes back. Two steps.
Then his arms are around me, and I’m being held by my father for the first time in years—really held, not the quick pat on the back or the shoulder squeeze, but the full embrace of a man who carried his broken son out of a parking garage at three in the morning and has spent every day since trying to put the pieces back together.
I break.
Not elegantly. Not quietly. The sound that comes out of me is animal and ugly and comes from the place where the twelve-year-old lives—the one who spent three days in a room with no windows and came out wired for violence because violence was the only language his captor spoke.
“I’m broken, dad. I’m fucking broken!”
My father holds me. He’s crying too—I can feel it, the silent shake of his shoulders, the wetness on the top of my head where his face is pressed. Two men in a kitchen, holding each other, both of them knowing what the world did to a twelve-year-old boy and neither of them able to fix it.
“You’re not broken,” my father says. His voice is wrecked. “You hear me, Kaiden? You are not broken. You were hurt. You were failed. But you are not broken, and you never were.”
“I should have never bullied her,” I say into his shoulder. “I saw the same thing in her that lives in me, and instead of—instead of recognizing it, I tried to break it. I tried to break someone who was already—”
“You didn’t know.”
“That doesn’t make it okay!”
“No. It doesn’t.” He pulls back. Holds me by the shoulders. Looks at me with red eyes and a wet face and no composure at all—just a father, stripped of everything, holding his son. “But you know now. And what you do with that knowledge is what matters. Not the past. The next thing.”
We sit in the kitchen for a long time. He makes coffee. I drink it. We don’t talk for a while, and the silence is the kind that holds weight without crumbling—the silence of two people who’ve just broken something open and are waiting for the dust to settle.
“Call Dr. Reeves today,” he says eventually. “Not this week. Today.”
“Yeah.”
“And Kaiden?”
“Yeah.”
“I loved your mother when I was your age. I’m not going to tell you what you feel or don’t feel. But whatever this is with Catherine—go slowly. She’s dealing with things that require real support. Not just a boy who cares about her. Professional support. Make sure she’s getting it.”
“Okay.”
“And for the love of God, do not let Thomas O’Farrell find you in his daughter’s room again, or I will not be able to save you from whatever he does to you.”
I almost smile. Almost.
The doorbell rings at seven that evening. Thomas and Fiona. Cat standing behind them, looking at the ground.
My father answers. The two men stand in the doorway and measure each other the way fathers do when their children have crossed a line that involves a bedroom and a locked door and the kind of silence that only means one thing.
“Callum.”
“Thomas.”
A beat. Thomas exhales through his nose. Fiona has her arm around Cat, who looks like she’d rather be literally anywhere else on the planet.
“I owe your son an apology,” Thomas says. It sounds like the words cost him money. “For accusing him of taking those photographs. Catherine has…explained the situation more fully. Kaiden was there because she asked him to be.”
My father nods. Doesn’t speak. Lets the silence do the work that words would make worse.
“However.” Thomas turns to me. His expression is not warm.
It is the expression of a man who has accepted an explanation without accepting the circumstances.
“If I ever find you in my daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night again, Kaiden, the conversation we have will be significantly less civil than this one. Are we clear?”
“Crystal clear, sir.”
“Good.” He turns to my father. “We need to discuss the camera situation. And the Penningtons. Can we talk in your office?”
The fathers disappear down the hall. Fiona follows my mother toward the kitchen, murmuring something about wine and needing to sit down.
And Cat and I are standing in the foyer, three feet apart, with the entire weight of last night and today and everything we said and did and broke open sitting between us like a physical object.
She looks at me. I look at her. Neither of us speaks.
There’s no dramatic declaration. No “I’m making you mine.
” No “let’s be together.” We’re not there.
We’re two people standing in a foyer who have shown each other the worst things inside them and are now trying to figure out what that means in daylight, with parents down the hall and the real world pressing in from every direction.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
A pause. The ghost of a smile on her mouth. Gone before it fully forms.
“My dad is going to murder you if he finds out what we did.”
“Yeah. I’m aware.”
“Was it worth it?”
I look at her. At the girl who told me her darkest secret and asked me to stay and chose me—chose me, out of everyone, out of the entire world that has failed her—to be the first person she let in.
“Ask me again when he’s not twenty feet away with a potential weapon.”
She snorts. Almost a laugh. The closest thing to lightness either of us has produced in forty-eight hours.
“Kaiden?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re not…I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what we are. I can’t—I’m not ready to put a name on it.”
“Neither am I.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
She turns toward the kitchen where the mothers are. Stops. Looks back at me over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she says. “For staying. For listening. For not—” She shakes her head. “For not running.”
She walks away. I stand in the foyer and listen to the murmur of fathers in the office and mothers in the kitchen and the particular, fragile architecture of two families trying to hold each other up.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
Cat: For the record—it was worth it.
I read it. Read it again. Put my phone away. Lean against the wall and close my eyes and breathe, and for the first time in six years, the noise in my head isn’t telling me to fight or run or break something.
It’s just quiet. And I’m terrified of it. Because quiet means I’m feeling something real, and real things can be taken away. But she’s twenty feet away, and she said my name in the dark, and she chose me.
So I’ll risk it.