Chapter 13 Kaiden #3
She doesn’t ask. Doesn’t need to. My mother has been where Cat is—she’s told me enough over the years for me to know that Saoirse Monaghan understands dark places from the inside. She just hands me the folded clothes, still warm from the dryer, and squeezes my arm.
“Take care of her, Kaiden.”
I bring the clothes upstairs. Cat is sitting on my bed, legs folded under her, looking small in my oversized t-shirt.
“My mom washed your stuff.” I set the folded pajamas on the bed. “Still warm.”
Cat picks them up. Holds them. Something crosses her face—surprise, then something softer. The particular emotion of realizing someone has done a small, kind thing without being asked.
“She didn’t have to—”
“That’s kind of her thing. She feeds you, then she washes your clothes. It’s a whole system.”
Cat almost smiles. Sets the pajamas aside. “I should change. Get back to my house before Penny picks me up for the game.”
“Hold on.”
I go to my closet. Pull it off the hook where it lives during off-season. The sweatshirt.
Grey. Heather grey with black accents. A hoodie with a lace-up neckline—the kind with the wide, flat laces that cross over the chest. On the front: the Edgewood Prep crest in forest green and gold, crossed lacrosse sticks beneath it, EDGEWOOD LACROSSE arched across the top in gold block letters.
The school colors woven into the stitching—green, gold, white.
And on the back, in white block letters across the shoulder blades: MONAGHAN.
I toss it to her. She catches it. Turns it over. Reads the back. Looks up at me.
“Wear it to the game.”
“Kaiden.”
“Wear it.”
She pulls it over her head. It swallows her—the hem hitting mid-thigh, the sleeves covering her hands, the hood enormous. The grey fabric against her wine-dark hair. The green and gold crest sitting on her chest. My name across her back.
Something in my chest detonates. Quietly. The kind of detonation that doesn’t make noise—just rearranges everything inside you.
“It’s huge,” she says, looking down at herself.
“It’s perfect.”
She looks up. Catches the expression on my face. Her eyes narrow. “Kaiden.”
“What.”
“You have a look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You have the look you get right before you do something that gets us both in trouble.”
I cross the room. Take the strings of the lace-up neckline between my fingers and pull her toward me, slow, until her face is inches from mine.
“You,” I say, “in my name. In my colors. Walking into a stadium full of people wearing this.” My voice drops. “I’m going to spend the entire game thinking about taking it off you.”
Her breath catches. “You can’t say things like that. I have to go home and act normal in front of my parents.”
“I’m going to be on a lacrosse field surrounded by two hundred people, and all I’m going to see is you in the stands in this sweatshirt, and I’m going to want to carry you out of that stadium and—”
“Kaiden.”
“—find somewhere private and peel this off you one inch at a—”
She puts her hand over my mouth. “Stop. I’m already—you’re making me—”
I grin behind her hand. She feels it. Drops her hand. Shoves my chest.
“You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
She doesn’t deny it. Just pulls the hood up, tucks her hands into the sleeves, and gives me a look that’s half exasperation and half something warmer.
I change her bandages. Sit on the bathroom counter—our spot now, apparently—and rewrap her wrists with fresh gauze. The cuts are closing. Clean.
“Iz’s mom,” I say. “She’s a therapist. Not a program. Not a facility. A person. She works with teens. I saw her for a year after the basement. She’s the reason I function.”
Cat looks at her wrists.
“One appointment,” I say. “If it’s terrible, never again. But if it’s not terrible…”
“If it’s not terrible.”
“Then maybe the two a.m. visits involve less blood and more of…the balcony. The talking. The part that didn’t hurt.”
She’s quiet. Runs her thumb over the bandage. “Okay. One appointment.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just be the person I call at two a.m.”
“Always.”
I walk her downstairs. My mother is waiting at the door—not hovering, just present, drying her hands on a dish towel with the particular posture of a woman who has something to say and is choosing her moment.
Cat turns to her. “Thank you for breakfast. And for…washing my things. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did.” My mother takes both of Cat’s hands. Holds them. Looks at her with an expression that has layers—warmth, recognition, the particular understanding of a woman who knows what bandaged wrists mean because she’s had her own.
Then she leans in. Close to Cat’s ear. Whispers something I can’t hear.
Cat’s face changes. Not crumbling—she’s still the ice princess, she’s still composed—but something behind her eyes goes liquid for a fraction of a second.
Her mouth presses into a line. Her chin lifts, the way it does when she’s preventing something from escaping.
She nods. Once. Quick. And when she pulls back, her eyes are bright but she doesn’t cry. Because she’s Catherine O’Farrell. She doesn’t cry in foyers at nine in the morning. She waits until she’s alone for that.
My mother squeezes her hands one more time. Steps back.
At the front door, I turn Cat toward me. She looks up—green eyes, tired, warm, wearing my name across her chest and the sleeves of my sweatshirt over her bandaged wrists. I kiss her. Soft. The kind that doesn’t start anything. The kind that says: I’m here. Come back.
She presses her forehead to my chin. “Penny’s picking me up for the game. I need to go home and pretend to be a normal person for an hour.”
“Text me when you’re there.”
“Kaiden.”
“Text me when you’re there.”
She rolls her eyes. Smiles. Opens the door. Walks across the lawn toward her house—MONAGHAN across her back catching the morning light, bare feet on the cold grass because she still doesn’t have shoes here, her pajamas folded in her arms.
My mother appears beside me. We stand in the doorway and watch her disappear through the gate. “She’s special, Kaiden.”
“Yeah.”
“The kind of special that doesn’t come around twice.”
I lean against the doorframe. Watch the gate. Think about the way she laughed on the balcony and the way she snorted and tried to deny it and the way her hand found mine under the blanket and the way she looked in my sweatshirt and the whisper my mother said that almost made the ice princess crack.
“Yeah, Ma,” I say. Quiet. Looking at the place where she was. “I know.”
My mother puts her hand on my arm. Holds it there for a moment. Then walks back to the kitchen.
I close the door. Stand in the foyer. The house smells like pancakes and coffee and the trace of Cat’s shampoo mixed with smoke from the balcony, and something in my chest is taking up space that used to belong to the noise—the static, the baseline hum I’ve been outrunning since I was twelve.
It’s not quiet because the noise is gone. It’s quiet because something else is louder.
I don’t say it. Not out loud. Not yet. It’s too big and too new and I’m too terrified of what it means and what it costs and what happens when you hand someone that word and they can’t hold it.
But it’s there. Growing. Taking up room. And for the first time, I’m not trying to outrun it.