Chapter 16 Catherine
Icome back in pieces.
Not all at once. Not a clean boot-up like the ice princess in the morning.
More like a system restoring from a crash—fragments returning in no order, each one heavier than the last. The couch under me.
The blanket that smells like Kaiden’s mother’s dryer sheets.
The weight of Kaiden’s arm across my stomach.
The low murmur of fathers in the hallway.
Then the rest of it. The photographs. The face. The name under the headshot.
Jack Rose. Garrett Pennington. Jack Rose. Garrett Pennington.
The two names circling each other in my skull like dogs in a fighting ring, snarling, merging, becoming one thing—one man with two faces who destroyed two children in two different rooms and then died in my parents’ kitchen with three bullets in him and I pulled the trigger not knowing I was killing the same monster who had already been inside Kaiden’s nightmares for years.
My stomach lurches. I press my face into the couch cushion and breathe through it. The nausea is still there—not the active, violent kind from the bathroom, but the low hum of a body that has been traumatized and hasn’t finished processing.
Kaiden feels me wake. His arm tightens. “Hey.” Quiet. Testing.
“I remember everything.”
He doesn’t say “I’m sorry” or “it’s going to be okay.” Just tightens his arm. Presses his face into my hair. The honesty of not pretending is the kindest thing he could give me right now.
Darla is in the armchair. She looks up from her phone.
“How are you feeling, Catherine? Scale of one to ten, ten being the worst.”
“Fifteen.”
“Honest. That’s good.” She doesn’t try to fix it. Doesn’t offer solutions or silver linings. Just nods and makes a note on her phone and says, “Your body went into shock earlier. It’s going to feel fragile for a while. That’s normal. Eat something when you can.”
My father is in the other armchair. He’s been there—I can tell by the impression in the cushion, by the empty water glass on the side table, by the particular look on his face that says he’s been watching me sleep and cataloguing my breathing the way he did in the hospital after the fire.
“Princess.” His voice cracks on the word. Every time.
“Hi, Daddy.”
He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. We’re past that. He just reaches over and puts his hand on my ankle—the part of me closest to him—and holds on.
Saoirse appears in the doorway. “Dinner’s here. Tacos. Cat's favorite.”
She didn’t cook. She ordered. Because Saoirse Monaghan, who believes every crisis begins and ends in the kitchen, assessed this particular crisis and decided it required someone else’s food, which tells me how bad today was from the outside looking in.
Kaiden pulls me off the couch. I don’t want to move. My body doesn’t want to move. But he puts his hands on my waist and walks me to the kitchen like a person guiding someone through the dark, and I let him because letting him is easier than fighting.
The photographs are gone. Someone—Callum, probably—has cleared the island. The folder is nowhere in sight. The surface is clean. Set with plates and napkins and the particular normalcy that parents construct when everything is falling apart and the only thing they can control is the dinner table.
I sit. Kaiden sits beside me. He puts a plate in front of me—two tacos, rice, beans—and watches me not touch it.
“Eat, Cat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I know. Eat anyway.”
He picks up a taco and puts it in my hand. Wraps my fingers around it. Holds them there until I take a bite, and the mechanical act of chewing—the jaw moving, the taste registering, the body accepting fuel it doesn’t want—is so mundane and so necessary and so unbearably kind that my eyes sting.
My father watches from across the island. Kaiden doesn’t see the nod—the small, private nod of a father watching a boy take care of his daughter and deciding, in that moment, that whatever else this boy is or has been, he is the right person for this moment. But I see it.
We eat. Or some of us do. Callum eats with the methodical focus of a man fueling a machine.
Saoirse picks at her food. My father eats half a taco and stares at the wall.
Kaiden eats everything on his plate because his body runs on food the way it runs on lacrosse—mechanically, consistently, regardless of emotional state.
I eat what Kaiden puts in front of me. One taco. Some rice. Enough.
Darla packs up after dinner. Squeezes my hand on her way out.
“I’ll be back tomorrow after school. If anything happens tonight—anything at all—you call me.”
“Thank you, Dr. Walsh.”
“Darla. And you’re welcome, sweetheart.”
She leaves. The door closes. The house gets quieter because we know the room situation conversation is about to happen.
Callum broaches it with the delicacy of a man who has been navigating politics for twenty years and knows how to introduce a controversial topic to a resistant audience.
“Thomas. The kids have had a day that would break most adults. I think it’s important they feel safe tonight. If that means being in the same room—”
“Absolutely not.” My father. Automatic. The reflex of a man whose daughter has been through things that make the idea of a boy in her bed categorically unacceptable, regardless of the boy.
“Daddy.”
“Catherine, I understand you’ve been sleeping in his room. And I’ve been…choosing to not address it. But tonight, after everything—”
“Tonight is exactly the night I can’t be alone.
” My voice is flat. Emptied. The voice of a person who has used up every resource and is operating on the generator.
“I can’t sleep alone, Daddy. Not tonight.
The nightmares will come and I’ll be in that room—his room, Jack’s room—and there will be nobody there to pull me out. ”
My dad looks at me. At Kaiden. At Callum.
Callum speaks carefully. “If you’d rather, we can set up the guest room for Cat and put Kaiden in his own room. Separate beds. Same hall. Or we can do whatever you’re comfortable with. This is your daughter.”
My father runs both hands down his face. The gesture of a man who has lost track of which battles matter and which ones don’t.
“I don’t know what’s up and down anymore,” he says.
To nobody in particular. To the ceiling.
To the universe that took his family apart and is still going.
“My daughter’s abuser is the same person who tortured my neighbor’s kid.
My wife is being blackmailed. My campaign is in flames.
And now I’m standing in someone else’s kitchen debating sleeping arrangements. ”
He looks at me. I look back. The ice princess is gone. There’s nothing behind my eyes except exhaustion and need—the need of a daughter asking her father to trust her.
“Come here,” he says.
I go to him. He sits on the bench in the breakfast nook and I sit beside him, and he puts his arm around me the way he used to when I was small—before the fire, before Jack, before the scars and the sealed records and the campaign. Just a father and his daughter on a bench.
“Tell me,” he says. “How he makes you feel.”
“Safe.” The word comes out immediately. No hesitation.
“He makes me feel safe, Daddy. Not the kind of safe where nothing bad happens—the kind where bad things happen and someone is there. He doesn’t try to fix me.
He just…stays. And when the nightmares come, he holds me and doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t leave. ”
My father is quiet.
“I can sleep when he’s there. I haven’t been able to sleep—really sleep, not the medicated kind—in years.
And I know that’s not…normal. I know it’s not healthy to need another person to sleep.
But tonight—” My voice cracks. “Tonight I found out that the man who raped me is the same man who tortured the boy I’m falling for.
And I am scared. I am so scared to be alone tonight. ”
My dad pulls me against his chest. Holds me. Breathes.
“Fine,” he says. Into my hair. “Same room. But Catherine—”
“I know.”
“I’m trusting you.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Saoirse crosses the kitchen. Sits on my other side. Takes my hand. Doesn’t say a word—just holds it, the way she held it this morning before she whispered the thing that almost broke the ice princess. The warmth of a mother’s hand. Not my mother’s. But a mother’s.
She pulls me into a hug. Brief. Fierce. Her mouth near my ear.
“You are not alone in this house,” she whispers. “You will never be alone in this house.”
I nod against her shoulder. Don’t speak. Can’t.
We all head to our respective rooms — Kaiden's parents to the other side of the house, my father in the guest bedroom on the main floor, Kaiden and I upstairs.
Kaiden’s bathroom. Door closed. Water running because I turned the faucet on and then forgot why.
I’m in his t-shirt and a pair of his sweats, standing at the sink, staring at my reflection. The eyeliner is gone—wiped off hours ago, the sharp wings dissolved in tears and shower steam. Without it, my face looks naked. Young. The face of a girl instead of the fortress.
I open the drawer. Looking for toothpaste. That’s the reason. Toothpaste.
The razor is there. A regular safety razor—silver handle, replaceable blade, the kind you buy at a drugstore.
Nothing special. Nothing designed for what my brain is currently imagining doing with it.
Just a grooming tool, sitting in a drawer beside dental floss and a tube of Colgate, and my hand is reaching for it before my brain authorizes the motion.
I pick it up.
Hold it. Turn it in my fingers. The weight of it—light, almost nothing, a few ounces of metal and blade. How can something so light carry so much promise? How can something this small offer the only thing my body is currently craving?
Release.