Chapter 13 Kaiden
It’s two in the morning and there’s tapping on my balcony door.
I’m not asleep. Haven’t been. I’ve been flat on my back for an hour running the day on a loop—the parking lot, the woods, the steering wheel, the sound of her saying my name—and my brain won’t power down. So I’m staring at the ceiling losing the insomnia war when the tapping starts.
Light. Irregular. Not the wind.
I reach under my bed and pull out the aluminum baseball bat I keep there. Not a lacrosse stick—those are for sport. The bat is for the other thing. The thing that makes me sleep with a weapon in arm’s reach six years after the basement.
I cross the room. Pull the curtain back from the glass balcony door.
Cat is on the balcony. Bare feet on the cold stone. Sleep shorts. A tank top too thin for October. She’s shaking—not shivering from cold, though she has to be freezing. Shaking the way a body shakes when the nervous system has detonated and the muscles have stopped taking orders from the brain.
I drop the bat and yank the door open. “Cat. What the fuck—how did you even get up here?”
There’s a trellis on the side of the house. Old, ornamental, the kind of thing that was romantic when the house was built in 1890 and is a liability now. She climbed it. In bare feet. At two in the morning. In this condition.
I pull her inside. She comes without resistance—ragdoll weight, boneless, a body that’s given up on staying upright. My hands are on her arms, trying to steady her, and that’s when I feel it.
Wet. Warm. On my fingers.
I don’t turn the light on. I don’t need to. I know what blood feels like. The particular temperature of it. The viscosity. I reach for the lamp anyway. Turn it on. Look down.
Fresh cuts on her wrists. Deep. Deliberate. The precise work of someone who’s been doing this long enough to have a technique. Blood has run down her forearms and dried in tracks, and newer cuts are still seeping at the edges.
My vision tunnels. My hands shake.
“Cat.” My voice is wrong—high, thin, the voice of a person trying not to panic and failing spectacularly. “How deep are these? Do I need to call an ambulance?”
She’s not looking at me. She’s looking through me. Through the wall. Her eyes are open but nobody’s home—the blank, glassy stare of a person who’s dissociated so completely that her body is just a vehicle parked with nobody at the wheel.
“Catherine.” Louder. My hands on her face, tilting it toward mine. “Stay with me. Tell me how bad.”
Something reboots behind her eyes. Slow. Reluctant.
“No ambulance,” she whispers. “They’re not deep enough. I know how deep is too deep.”
The fact that she has a calibrated understanding of that threshold makes my stomach drop through the floor.
I’m eighteen. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not a doctor, not a therapist, not a single one of the people who are trained for this moment. I’m a kid in boxers with a baseball bat on the floor and blood on his hands and zero qualifications for what’s happening.
The shower. That’s where I go when the panic hits. When the basement comes back too hard and the walls close in and my chest won’t expand. The shower. Warm water. A space small enough to contain you, open enough to breathe.
I pick her up—arm under her knees, arm behind her back—and carry her to the bathroom. Set her on her feet in the tub. She stands there swaying while I reach around her and turn the water on. Warm, not hot.
I step in with her. Boxers on. She’s still in her shorts and tank. The water hits us both and she flinches—not from temperature but from contact, the sensation of being present in her body when her mind has been trying to vacate it.
I take her arms. Gently—as gently as my shaking hands can manage.
Hold them under the stream and watch the blood run pink against the white tub, swirling toward the drain.
She doesn’t flinch. The tolerance she has for pain—the absolute absence of reaction while someone cleans her wounds—tells me this has happened many, many times.
I work slowly. Wash the dried blood from her forearms. Check each cut. They’re not deep enough for stitches. Deliberate but controlled—she knows her own limits. That fact is not a comfort.
When the water runs clear, I turn it off.
Grab two towels from the rack. Wrap her first. Then myself.
She stands in my bathroom, dripping, wrapped in a towel, and her eyes have come back online—no longer blank, now just exhausted.
The particular exhaustion of a person who went to war with herself and both sides lost.
I sit her on the counter. Find the antibiotic cream, the gauze, the medical tape. My hands shake through the first bandage. Steady by the second. She watches me work and something cracks in her expression—the blankness shifting into guilt.
“Kaiden. I’m okay.”
“You’re bleeding in my bathroom.”
“I’ve bled worse.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
When I’m done, both wrists are wrapped clean. She looks down at the white bandages and the expression on her face is the weary recognition of a person staring at evidence of their own pattern.
“What happened?”
She tells me in pieces. Scattered. The way information comes when a brain is overloaded and can’t organize.
Burke called her parents. Reported “disruptive behavior.” Her mother took it like a personal insult.
Then Jon’s father called—told Thomas that Cat was “unstable,” that her relationship with me was “reckless,” that she’d assaulted his son.
Then the hallway bomb—someone relayed what she said to Jon.
“I’ve killed a man.” Those words reaching her father’s ears through the particular telephone game of prep school parents and political operatives.
“My father lost it,” she says. “The quiet kind. The face he makes when everything he’s built is crumbling. He said if the press connects it to the sealed records, his campaign is finished. He called me reckless. Selfish. Said I put my ego ahead of the family.”
“Then my mother said they should send me back to the program. A year of isolation. No visitors. No privacy. A cage dressed up as treatment.”
“They can’t make you go. You’re eighteen.”
“They can pull tuition. Cut me off. Make every day a fight. They’ve spent two years burying what happened, and I set it on fire in one morning because Jon called me a name and I wanted him to be scared of me for once.”
I sit on the counter beside her. Shoulders touching. The bathroom is small and bright and too clinical for what’s happening in it.
“Cat. Please don’t do this anymore.” I’m not commanding.
Not demanding. Begging. The sound of Kaiden Monaghan begging is so unfamiliar my own voice surprises me.
“I know I can’t fix this. I’m a kid, Cat.
A stupid kid with a bat under his bed and a car he rebuilt and zero qualifications for what’s happening right now. But please. Please don’t.”
She looks at me. The distance is gone. What’s there is raw and present and terrified—not of the cuts, but of the boy on the counter asking her to stay alive.
“I can’t promise that.”
“Then promise you’ll call me before. Not after. Before.”
A long silence. “Okay. I’ll call you before.”
It’s not a solution. It’s a tourniquet. But at two-thirty a.m. with blood still under my fingernails, it’s what we’ve got. I give her one of my t-shirts and sweats that swallow her. She changes in the bathroom. I pull on a dry pair of shorts and a hoodie.
We don’t go to bed. I open the balcony door—the real one, the glass-paned door that leads to the small stone balcony overlooking both our yards.
It’s barely big enough for one wrought-iron chair and a person standing, the kind of old-house Juliet balcony that looks romantic from the ground and impractical from up here.
I grab the blanket from my bed. The tin from my nightstand drawer—pre-rolled joints, lighter, Dr. Reeves’s prescription card tucked inside. I sit in the chair and pull Cat down onto my lap, wrapping the blanket around both of us.
The October night is cold enough that our breath clouds. The backyard stretches below us—dark lawn, the connecting gate, and beyond it, Cat’s house. All the windows dark. Her parents either asleep or pretending to be.
I light a joint. Take a drag. Offer it to her. She takes it. Inhales. Coughs.
“Smooth,” she says, eyes watering.
“First time?”
“With weed, yes. With being a disaster on a balcony at two a.m., no. That’s a recurring event.”
I laugh. The sound is too loud for the hour. She presses her hand over my mouth.
“Shh! Your parents!”
“Their room is on the other side of the house. They can’t hear anything.”
“You’re sure?”
“Cat. I’ve been smoking out here since sophomore year. If they could hear, I’d know.”
She takes another drag. Holds it better this time. Exhales slow, the smoke curling silver against the dark.
“Medical?” she asks, looking at the joint.
“Reeves prescribed it for insomnia and anxiety. My parents know. It’s this or the pills, and the pills make me feel like I’m watching my life through a window.”
She laughs—short, surprised. “That’s exactly what I said about my meds. Word for word.”
“Ghosts with prescriptions. We should start a support group.”
“Meetings on this balcony. Bring your own blanket.”
We pass it back and forth. The edge comes off—not a lot, just enough to loosen the thing that’s been wound tight in both of us all day. Her shoulders drop. Her breathing slows. The trembling is gone, replaced by the loose-limbed warmth of a body finally standing down from high alert.
“You said you’d tell me more,” she says. “About what happened to you.”
I take a long drag. Hold. Release.
“The family who took me was the Penningtons.”
Cat goes still against my chest.
“Jon’s older brother. Garrett. He was twenty. I was twelve. His father’s company was in trouble—bad deal, debts stacking up—and he thought if he took Callum Monaghan’s kid, my dad would bail them out to get me back.”
“Kaiden—”