Chapter 17 Kaiden
It’s been a week since the photographs.
Seven days since the world split open on a kitchen island and showed us the face of the man who lived inside both our nightmares.
Seven days of Darla’s grounding exercises and my father’s phone calls to lawyers and Cat sleeping in my bed every night because neither of us can close our eyes alone anymore.
Seven days of carrying a truth so heavy it’s changed the shape of everything—our families, our friendships, the investigation, the way Cat and I look at each other across a room and see not just each other but the shadow of the same monster standing between us.
We’re not okay. We’re functioning. There’s a difference.
Homecoming is next weekend, and I’m standing at Cat’s front door with flowers.
White anemone flowers. Blush roses. The florist added grey and white berry sprigs for texture and charged me eighty dollars for the arrangement, which I paid without blinking because the look on Cat’s face when she sees her favorite flowers will be worth eight hundred.
Thomas answers the door. Sees me. Sees the flowers. His mouth does the thing it does when he’s preventing a smile from fully forming because Thomas O’Farrell does not smile at boys standing on his porch—he evaluates them.
“Kaiden.”
“Mr. O’Farrell. I’m here to ask Cat to homecoming. Is she home?”
“She’s in the garden. Come in.” He steps aside. Glances at the flowers again. “You would have had better luck with a taco bouquet.”
“Tacos are being delivered at six.”
“You’re learning.”
We walk into the kitchen. Thomas pours himself coffee and leans against the island—the posture of a man who has something to say and is deciding how to begin. I know the posture. My father does it too. The politician’s loading screen.
“Sit down for a minute, Kaiden.”
I sit, set the flowers on the counter and wait.
"Your father tells me you've applied to Georgetown."
"Yes sir. And Columbia. And American University. And a few others."
Thomas's eyebrows rise. "Political science."
"Political science and economics. My father's career, the campaign work I've been around my whole life—I want to understand the machinery.
How policy gets built, how power moves, how the system works and where it fails.
The Federal Reserve, the treasury, institutional economics—that's where I'm headed. "
"Interesting." Thomas takes a sip of coffee. "Because Cat's going in an entirely different direction."
"I know. Nuclear science and engineering.
MIT early admission. Standing offers from Caltech and Georgia Tech.
" I pause. "We're not following each other, sir.
Our academic paths couldn't be more different.
She's going to build reactors for the Air Force.
I'm going to study the economic structures that fund them.
We might end up in the same city or we might end up on opposite coasts. That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
"The point is that I'm not rearranging my future around a girl.
I've wanted this since freshman year—since I started reading my father's policy briefings instead of doing my homework.
Cat didn't create that ambition. She just happens to be the only person at Edgewood who doesn't think it's weird that a lacrosse player with tattoos wants to work at the Federal Reserve.
And I would never ask Cat to give up on her dreams just to follow me.
We are two smart people with big ambitions. "
Thomas studies me over his coffee. The evaluation happening in real time—data points processed, conclusions forming.
I've been on the other side of this assessment before, from teachers and coaches and adults who see the captain and the dark reputation and the ink and assume the ceiling is athletics.
Speaking of the ink. Thomas's eyes travel to my forearms—the sleeves of my henley pushed up, the tattoos visible from wrist to elbow. Vines. Thorns. Blackwork pieces.
"Your father mentioned the tattoos have significance," he says carefully.
"They cover scars. Garrett's work." I don't flinch saying it. That's new. "My dad took me for the first one at fifteen. Sat in the shop and held my hand. The rest I got over the next two years. Each one covers something I don't want to see when I look at my own arms."
Thomas is quiet for a beat. Then: "Cat has talked about that. Getting tattoos over the burn scars someday. She's never gone through with it."
"She will. When she's ready."
"You seem very certain about what Catherine is going to do."
"I'm certain about who she is. The rest follows."
Thomas sets his mug down. Looks at me with an expression I haven't seen from him before—not the evaluation, not the suspicion. Something warmer.
"You know, Kaiden. When I look at you, I don't see an athlete with tattoos.
I see a kid who survived something that should have destroyed him and is standing in my kitchen applying to Georgetown and bringing my daughter flowers and talking about monetary policy and institutional economics.
" He pauses. "That's not what I expected when you showed up in my driveway three months ago. "
"Three months ago I was bullying your daughter. I wasn't what anyone should have expected."
"No. But people are more than their worst behavior. Especially at eighteen." He picks up his mug. "Go ask her. She's been in the garden for an hour pretending to read."
I grab the flowers. Head for the french doors. Then stop. “Mr. O’Farrell.”
“Thomas.”
“Thomas. Thank you. For giving me a chance. Most fathers wouldn’t have, after how I started.”
He considers this. “Most fathers haven’t watched a boy clean blood off their daughter’s wrists at two in the morning and then cook her breakfast. You earned the chance, Kaiden. Don’t waste it.”
I nod and walk outside. Cat is lying in the garden.
Not gardening—lying flat on her back in the dry October grass, a book open on her chest that she hasn’t read a page of, staring at the grey sky.
She’s in leggings and one of my hoodies—she’s been stealing them systematically, and my closet is thinning—and her hair is loose and her eyes are closed and she looks like a painting of someone trying very hard to relax and not quite getting there.
I set the flowers down beside her. Lie in the grass. She doesn’t open her eyes.
“I heard you come outside,” she says. “You walk heavy.”
“I walk with authority.”
“You walk like a linebacker who hasn’t learned about stealth.”
I roll onto my side. Prop my head on my hand.
Look at her—the freckles, the faint scar at her hairline, the way her lashes rest against her cheeks.
My hand finds her hip. Settles. The thumb hooks under the waistband of her leggings—not sexual, possessive.
The particular contact that says “mine” without sound.
She opens her eyes. Looks at the flowers.“White anemones,” she says. Soft. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything you tell me. It’s a curse.”
She picks them up. Brings them to her nose. The smile that appears—small, unguarded, the one that belongs to the girl and not the princess—is worth every penny of the eighty dollars and every second of the conversation with her father.
“Homecoming,” I say. Not a question.
“Are you asking or telling?”
“Which one gets me the answer I want?”
She looks at me. “You’d take me even if I said no.”
“I’d take you anywhere, Cat. The dance is just the excuse to see you in a dress.”
I pull her toward me by the hip. Her body rolls against mine in the grass, and I kiss her—not the soft thing from the morning, the other kind.
The kind with teeth. My hand in her hair, pulling her head back, my mouth on her throat.
She gasps and her hand fists in my hoodie and I bite down on the spot below her ear that makes her make the sound I’m addicted to.
“Kaiden. Your parents are watching from their kitchen.”
“They can look away.”
“My father is watching from his kitchen.” I pause. Consider. Release her throat but not her hip. “Fine. But tonight—”
“Tonight.” She smiles against my mouth. “Yes. To homecoming. And to tonight.”
I pull her up from the grass. Keep her hand in mine.
Walk her back toward the house, and through the kitchen window I can see both sets of parents at the island—my mother pouring wine, Thomas opening his door for my father, the four of them settling into the particular rhythm of two families who have been welded together by crisis and are now, slowly, learning to be together by choice.
Cat squeezes my hand. I squeeze back.
One week. Homecoming. A game. A dance. The normal things. The things teenagers are supposed to do between the extraordinary and the unbearable.
We walk inside. I hold the door for her. She walks through. And for one evening, in the space between the last disaster and the next, we’re just two people going to a dance.
Homecoming. The field. The stands are the fullest I’ve ever seen them.
Not just parents and students—scouts. I spot three in the press box before warm-ups start, recognizable by their khakis and clipboards and the particular posture of men whose job is to watch seventeen-year-olds play a sport and decide which ones are worth investing in.
Georgetown. Columbia. Syracuse. My father told me this morning that he confirmed all three.
The opposing team is Holy Oak Academy—private Catholic school, two towns north, our biggest rival and the only team in the league with an undefeated record to match ours.
Their players are big—bigger than us on average—and their reputation for physical play is well-documented.
They play lacrosse the way some teams play hockey: with an understanding that the rules are flexible and the penalties are worth it.
I scan the stands. Find her.