Chapter 16 Catherine #3
I can’t do it today. My hands are too shaky for the sharp wing.
The precision required—the steady hand, the clean line—is beyond what my body can produce right now.
So I leave it. For the first time since middle school, I walk out of a bathroom without my eyeliner on, and the face in the mirror looks like someone I used to know.
The girl before the armor. Before the ice.
Hair goes up. A bun. Not the sleek, intentional kind I wear to look polished—the messy kind, the kind that says “I couldn’t find the energy to wash it and this was the best I could do.”
School uniform. The skirt. The shirt. The tie. The blazer. The Vans. Every item put on with the mechanical automation of a body running a program without the operator present.
Kaiden drives. I lean against the window. He holds my hand on the console and doesn’t ask how I am because he knows the answer and respects me enough not to make me say it.
The day passes in fragments. Classes I attend but don’t hear.
Hallways I walk through without seeing. The boys close around me—tighter than usual, reading the state I’m in without being told.
Iz walks me between every class. Danny carries my books without asking.
Ryan appears with food I didn’t request but eat because he puts it in front of me the way Kaiden does—not offering, just placing, making the choice for me because making choices is beyond my current capacity.
Second period free block. Library. Penny.
She’s already there. Back corner. Our table. She sees me coming and her face does the thing faces do when they see someone they love in visible pain—the flinch, the softening, the quick recalibration from “hey girl” to “what happened.”
I sit across from her. Drop my bag. Look at her. “I need to tell you something.”
“You look like death.”
“I feel like death. Listen.”
Iz is three tables away, close enough to intervene, far enough to give us privacy. Penny glances at him, then back at me.
“You know I told you about Jack. My abuser. The man I killed.”
“Yeah.”
“Jack isn’t his real name. His real name is Garrett Pennington.”
Penny’s hand stops moving. The pen she was fidgeting with goes still.
“Garrett,” she repeats. The name landing in her mouth like something she’s tasted before and hoped to never taste again.
“Jon’s older brother. He changed his name after he got out of Switzerland. Moved to Connecticut. Found me.”
Penny’s face has gone very pale. Not the gradual drain I’ve seen on other people when I tell them about Jack. Something different. Something personal.
“There’s more,” I say. “The boy Garrett kidnapped and tortured before he came to Connecticut—before he became Jack—was Kaiden.”
The library is quiet. The particular quiet of a room full of books absorbing sound.
“Kaiden and I share the same abuser, Penny. Garrett Pennington tortured Kaiden when they were twelve. Then he was released from the facility. Then he moved to North Jared and changed his name to Jack Rose and spent four years raping me. And Jon’s father—Alastair—knew the entire time.
Knew his son was a predator. Knew he was in Connecticut.
And then pushed Jon to date me after I killed Garrett.
Because the Penningtons don’t lose. They just find new ways to control the people their family has already destroyed. ”
I finish. The words hanging in the air between us.
Penny hasn’t blinked. Her hand is flat on the table. The pen is on the floor where she dropped it.
“Penny?”
“I know,” she says. Barely a whisper. “I know what Garrett is. What he was.”
The air changes.
“What do you mean?”
She swallows. Looks at the table. Looks at Iz three tables away. Looks at her own hands.
“Before Switzerland,” she says. Her voice is thin. Threadbare. The voice of a person pulling a bandage off something they’d hoped had healed. “Before what he did to you. Garrett tried it with me first.”
The library tilts.
“We were all kids together. You know that. The Penningtons, the Monaghans, the MacHales—same neighborhood, same schools, same birthday parties. Garrett was older—five, six years older than us. But he was always around. The older brother who hung out with the little kids. Nobody thought it was weird because nobody thinks it’s weird until it is. ”
She stops. Breathes. Continues.
“He cornered me after a lacrosse practice. I was ten? Eleven? He was—I don’t know, eighteen? Nineteen? He tried to—” She shakes her head. “He didn’t get far. Because Xander came looking for me. We were supposed to walk home together and I didn’t show up, so he came to find me. And he found…that.”
“X saved you.”
“X beat Garrett unconscious with a lacrosse stick. At twelve years old. Beat him until Garrett stopped moving. Then he told me to run and he stayed.” Her voice cracks.
“I don’t know what happened after I left.
X has never told me. But when Garrett was arrested—for what he did to me and to other kids in the community—Xander was the one who went to the police.
His testimony was sealed. Nobody knows except me, him, and the lawyers. ”
“That’s what happened between you two,” I say. “That’s why everything changed.”
“How do you go back to being best friends with someone who saw you like that?” she says.
Not asking me. Asking the air. “How do you look at the person who saved your life and not see the worst moment of it reflected back? Xander looks at me and he sees that day. I look at Xander and I see the boy who beat a man unconscious to protect me. And neither of us can figure out how to exist in the space between those two things.”
Tears. Hers. The first I’ve ever seen Penny MacHale cry. Not dramatic—quiet, leaking, the kind that come from a place so deep they bypass the usual defenses.
I reach across the table. Take her hand.
“We’re all connected to him,” I say. “You. Kaiden. Me. Garrett Pennington touched all of us. And now we’re sitting in a library together trying to figure out how to survive it.”
Penny squeezes my hand. Hard. The grip of a person who has been alone with a secret for five years and is, for the first time, holding the hand of someone who understands.
“We need to destroy them,” she says. The tears still falling but her voice going hard underneath. “The Penningtons. All of them. Alastair. Jon. The whole fucking family.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Count me in.”
The bell rings. Neither of us moves. Iz looks over from his table, reads the situation, and stays seated. The library empties around us.
Two girls at a table in a library. Both of them touched by the same monster. Both of them still standing.
For now, standing is enough.