Chapter 19 #2
Swollen. The left eye nearly shut. Her lip split and crusted with blood.
A bruise spreading from her cheekbone to her jaw.
Her skin is raw—angry red abrasions on her arms, her legs, the visible skin of her back where the shirt has ridden up.
Chemical burns. Bleach burns. The kind of damage that comes from a scrub brush and undiluted chemicals applied to human skin.
She’s not conscious. Her eyes are closed. Her body is limp as the EMTs work—checking vitals, starting an IV, the calm urgency of medical professionals who have seen bad things and are currently seeing one of the worse ones.
I drop to my knees beside her. In the dirt. In the blood. In the bleach-soaked earth of a Pennington basement, the same kind of room where they held me six years ago, and the symmetry is so monstrous that my vision tunnels and for a terrible second I’m twelve again and the room has no windows and—
No. Not now. She needs you now.
I take her hand. The one the EMT isn’t working on. Her fingers are cold. Ice cold. How long has she been on this floor? How long has she been lying in the dirt in wet clothes in an October basement?
“Cat.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Kitty Cat, I’m here. I found you. You’re safe.”
No response. Her eyes don’t open. Her hand doesn’t squeeze. The only sign of life is the monitor the EMT has attached—the beep of a heartbeat, thin and fast, the cardiac rhythm of a body in shock.
“We need to move her,” the EMT says. “Now. She’s hypothermic, she’s got at least two broken ribs, possible internal damage, and she’s been sedated with something we need to identify. The hospital is twenty minutes.”
They lift her onto the stretcher. I don’t let go of her hand. Walk beside her up the stairs, through the house, out the front door into the chaos of lights and sirens and October cold. The stretcher goes into the ambulance. The EMTs climb in.
Thomas appears beside me. His face is destroyed—the politician gone, the father gone, what’s left is just a man whose daughter was pulled off a dirt floor and loaded into an ambulance.
“Ride with her,” I say. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He looks at me. Nods. Climbs in. The doors close. The ambulance pulls out, and the sirens start, and I stand in the driveway of a Pennington property watching it disappear down the dark road.
Xander is beside me. When did he get here? His face is white. His hands are fists.
“Penny?” I ask.
“Second ambulance. Already gone. She was conscious. Drugged but conscious. She—” His voice breaks.
Xander Anderson’s voice breaks, and I’ve known him for six years and this is the first time.
“She said my name when they brought her out. She saw me and she said my name, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t even—”
I grab him. Pull him in. The hug is brief and hard and neither of us will ever talk about it. He pulls back. Wipes his face with his sleeve.
“Hospital,” he says. “Now.”
We drive.
The waiting room at Edgewood General is designed for approximately forty people. There are sixty-seven of us.
Thomas, pacing the length of the room like a caged animal, his phone in his hand, alternately calling lawyers and staring at the ER doors.
My parents—my mother at the nurses’ station, managing information flow with the particular competence of a woman who has decided that if she can’t perform surgery, she can at least make sure the people who can have everything they need.
My father on the phone with the police chief, the district attorney, and three media contacts, because the press has already gathered outside and Callum Monaghan does not allow narratives to be shaped by anyone but himself.
Penny’s parents—Gideon and Maura MacHale, who arrived forty minutes ago and have been sitting in rigid, terrified silence ever since. Gideon is a man built like Penny—compact, fierce, the kind of person who radiates energy even when sitting still. Maura is crying quietly, her hand in her husband’s.
The boys. Iz in the chair beside me, his hand on my arm, the silent anchor.
Danny against the wall, arms crossed, watching everything.
Ryan on his laptop because Ryan processes emotion through productivity, and right now he’s building the digital case against the Penningtons with the focused intensity of a person who has found the only way to help and is maximizing it. Xander—
Xander is not sitting. Xander has not sat down since we arrived. He paces—three steps one way, three steps back—and every few minutes he stops and stares at the doors to the treatment area like he can will them to open by intensity alone.
“X.” Iz, calm. “Sit down. You’re making the nurses nervous.”
“I’m not sitting down until I know she’s okay.”
“Penny’s stable. They said stable.”
“Stable isn’t okay. Stable is alive. I need okay.”
Nobody argues. Xander paces. The room holds its breath.
The first update comes at 1:14 a.m. A doctor—young, tired, the particular exhaustion of an ER physician at the tail end of a shift that just became the longest of his career. He asks for Thomas.
Thomas stops pacing. My mother moves to his side. They follow the doctor to the hallway. I watch through the glass partition.
The doctor talks. Thomas listens. His hand goes to the wall. Then to his mouth. Then to his eyes. My mother’s hand is on his arm. She’s asking questions—I can see her mouth moving, the precise, organized way she extracts information, the same way she manages everything: thoroughly.
They come back. Thomas sits. He doesn’t speak for a long time.
“Two broken ribs. One of them shifted and lacerated the tissue around her lung. Not a full puncture but close—they’re monitoring.
Chemical burns across her back, arms, and legs.
Bleach. The burns on her wrists are infected because the bleach got into the cuts that were already there.
Her jaw is contused. Concussion. Hypothermia from the wet clothes and the cold.
And the drugs—” His voice breaks. “They injected her with a veterinary sedative. Multiple times. Her body metabolized most of it but her liver is stressed. They’re running panels. ”
The room absorbs this information the way a room absorbs a blow—silently, collectively, the oxygen leaving. Iz’s hand tightens on my arm.
“She’s in and out,” Thomas continues. “Not a coma. Sedated for pain management. They’ll reduce it gradually over the next day and see how she responds.”
“The prognosis,” my mother says. Careful. The word nobody wants to ask about.
“Guarded. The rib is the biggest concern. If it shifts further, surgery. The chemical burns will scar—they already know that. The infection needs to be controlled. The drugs need to clear her system.” He swallows. “A few days, minimum. Maybe a week. Depending on the rib.”
I lean forward in my chair. My elbows on my knees.
My face in my hands. The information is clinical but the translation is simple: Cat is lying in a hospital bed with broken bones and chemical burns and veterinary drugs in her system because a boy whose brother raped her for four years decided that a bucket of bleach and a set of zip ties were the appropriate response to rejection.
Danny’s voice, quiet: “The Penningtons?”
My father answers. “Jon and Alastair are in custody. Separate facilities. Jon is being treated for injuries sustained during apprehension.” A pause. “Extensive injuries.”
He looks at me. I look at my knuckles. Swollen. Split. The particular damage of a person who hit another person with enough force to break things.
“Fiona is with the police,” my father continues. “Not charged yet. She’s cooperating. Giving a full statement. Her level of involvement is being determined.”
Thomas makes a sound. Raw. Wounded.
“She didn’t know,” I say. Quiet. Everybody looks at me.
“In the basement—from what the officers described—Fiona tried to bring Cat water. She fought Jon. Alastair had to physically restrain her. She’s a lot of things, but she’s not…
she’s not one of them. She’s a woman who was manipulated by a sociopath and made terrible decisions under terrible pressure. ”
Thomas doesn’t respond. The fury and the grief and the betrayal are all competing for space in the same body, and he doesn’t have the capacity to parse Fiona’s culpability right now. That’s for lawyers and therapists and time. Not a hospital waiting room at one in the morning.
The second update comes at 2:30 a.m.
Penny is being released. Drugged but no lasting physical damage. She’s awake, alert, demanding to see Cat, demanding to see Xander, demanding a phone because hers was destroyed, and generally being Penny MacHale at full volume from a hospital bed, which the nurses are coping with admirably.
Xander disappears through the doors the second they’re opened for Penny’s parents.
Nobody comments on this. Gideon MacHale looks at Xander walking beside him toward his daughter’s room and says nothing, because Gideon MacHale has known Xander Anderson since both children were in diapers and has been watching the thing between them for years and is choosing, tonight, to let it be whatever it needs to be.
Twenty minutes later, Xander comes back. His eyes are red. His jaw is set. He sits down beside me for the first time all night.
“She’s okay,” he says. “Penny’s okay. She’s—” He stops. Starts again. “She asked me to stay. She looked at me and said ‘don’t leave.’ And I can’t—I can’t talk about this right now. But she’s okay.”
Iz puts his hand on Xander’s shoulder. Danny moves to his other side. Ryan closes his laptop. The five of us sit in a row—battered, exhausted, held together by something that predates this night and will outlast it.
3:15 a.m. The doctor comes for Thomas. This time, my mother doesn’t have to insert herself—Thomas turns to me.
“Come with me.”