Chapter 24 - Catherine
December.
The cast is off. The ribs have healed—or at least stopped protesting every breath.
The chemical burns have faded from angry red to the puckered pink of new scars, joining the older ones like fresh entries in a ledger I didn’t ask to keep.
The bandages are gone. The eyeliner is back to its sharpest. The ice princess has been restored to factory settings, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you’d never know she spent five days in a hospital bed in October.
But I know what to look for. And I see it every morning in the mirror—the particular watchfulness behind my eyes that wasn’t there in September.
The way I count exits in every room without deciding to.
The way my hands still go to my wrists when the intrusive thoughts come, pressing into the scars like a reflex I’m trying to rewire.
The urge to cut still comes. Darla says it will for a long time—maybe always.
But the frequency is less. The tools are better.
When the spinning starts, I have things now—grounding exercises, the edibles, Kaiden’s hands on my body reminding me I’m solid and present and here.
On the worst days, I climb into our bed and let him hold me and the nightmares still come but they’re quieter, and the mornings after are something I can stand in without wanting to leave.
Progress. The kind you measure in degrees, not miles.
The world outside our house has been doing its own reckoning.
Burke was fired—not quietly. The board made a public statement, and the investigation that followed his termination uncovered things that made the MRS-degree speech look like a warm-up.
He’d been failing female students for years.
Three girls came forward saying he’d offered to raise their grades in exchange for sexual favors.
The police raided his house and found drugs and a hard drive that put him in handcuffs.
He’s in prison now. The classroom where he told me my MIT acceptance was a stepping stone to a wedding ring is being renovated.
The Penningtons took a plea deal. Life without parole.
Both of them—Jon and Alastair—in separate facilities.
They pled to avoid a trial, which means I never had to testify in open court, which means the sealed records stay sealed and the details of what happened in that basement don’t become public record.
Arthur Walsh negotiated the terms. The deal included cooperation—both Penningtons provided information about the broader network.
Turns out their system went deeper than any of us imagined.
Cops. Judges. Lawyers. Other affluent families in other communities.
An entire infrastructure built on the backs of girls like me.
More victims came forward. Dozens. From North Jared, from Edgewood, from three other towns where Garrett operated under different names.
The investigation is ongoing. The Pennington name, once synonymous with old money and country clubs, is now synonymous with the thing it always should have been: predation.
My mother testified against them. Full cooperation in exchange for a reduced sentence.
She got three years—conspiracy charges, obstruction, failure to report.
Not what she deserved. Not what I wanted.
But the alternative was a trial where I’d have to sit across from her in a courtroom and recount every moment she chose Alastair’s instructions over her daughter’s safety, and Darla said the psychological cost of that would set me back further than the satisfaction of a longer sentence would move me forward.
So I took the deal. My father signed the divorce papers the same week.
Prenup intact. She lost everything but the house here—the Cape house, the publishing contracts, the image she spent twenty years constructing.
We’re still at the Monaghans’. Dad decided we’d stay through the end of the school year—no disruption, no moving, no forcing me to switch schools or commute from a new address while I’m applying to graduate programs and finishing senior year.
Callum and Saoirse didn’t blink. The guest room is Dad’s.
Kaiden’s room is ours. The kitchen is everyone’s.
Dad is happy. Not performing it—actually happy.
Something about removing the source of the poison—the marriage, the secrets, the constant negotiation with a wife who was being controlled by someone else—released a pressure he’d been carrying so long he didn’t know what it felt like to put it down.
He cooks now. He reads novels instead of briefings.
He laughs at dinner. He and Callum have become the kind of friends who finish each other’s sentences and argue about sports and share custody of the good whiskey.
Xander is not better. He’s better at hiding it.
I know the difference because I used to be the one hiding.
The particular architecture of “fine”—the right smile, the right words, the showing up and participating and performing normalcy so thoroughly that everyone around you relaxes.
X has it down. He comes to school. He plays lacrosse.
He sits at our table and makes the right jokes at the right moments and nobody sees the cracks except me and Kaiden, and maybe Iz, because Iz sees everything.
The fights haven’t stopped. He’s just gotten better at covering the evidence. Long sleeves. Concealer on the bruises. The particular careful movements of a person with injuries they don’t want noticed.
And Penny. Something is wrong with Penny too.
She won’t come to therapy with me—I’ve asked four times.
She deflects with humor, changes the subject, redirects to my problems like a magician drawing attention away from the trick.
She’s off—not dramatically, not in a way that makes headlines, but in the particular way that only a best friend would notice.
The texts come later than usual. The laughter is a beat behind.
She’s doing something—I don’t know what—that she’s not telling me about.
And she and Xander cannot be in the same room.
Not “won’t”—can’t. The last time they were both at our house, the tension was so physical it changed the temperature.
Penny walked in, saw Xander in the kitchen, and walked right back out.
He watched her leave with an expression that was so raw I had to look away.
Since then, I schedule around it. If Penny’s coming over, X makes himself scarce.
If X is here, I meet Penny elsewhere. The logistics of managing two people who are destroying each other by refusing to be near each other while clearly being unable to stop thinking about each other.
Whatever is happening between them—whatever the thing is that started when Xander beat Garrett unconscious with a lacrosse stick to save her at thirteen—it’s not resolved. It’s not fading. It’s compressing. And compressed things, eventually, explode.
The bell rings and I know before the teacher says it. Early release. December in New England, and the sky has been threatening all morning—that particular grey that means business, the heavy, low ceiling of clouds that says “you have about forty minutes before this gets real.”
Kaiden is at my locker. Of course he is. “They’re letting us out. Roads are already getting bad.”
“I know. I could feel the barometric pressure drop during last period.”
“You’re such a nerd, Cat.”
“A nerd who got into MIT. Let’s go.”
The drive home takes forty-five minutes instead of fifteen.
Kaiden drives the Skyline through thickening snow with the focused intensity of a person who loves his car more than most things and is acutely aware of what road salt does to Japanese metal.
By the time we pull into the garage, the roads are white and the wind is picking up.
Inside, the parents are waiting. Dad and Callum at the island. Saoirse making something warm. The particular configuration of adults who have been watching the weather channel and worrying. Twenty minutes later, the lights flicker. Then die.
Callum sighs. “Whole-house generator. Let me see if I can get it started.”
He can’t. He and Kaiden spend fifteen minutes in the garage before coming back defeated and snow-dusted.
“Won’t turn over,” Kaiden says. “The system is too big for me to troubleshoot in the dark. We need a technician.”
Dad has the fireplace going. Saoirse has candles. The house settles into the particular warmth of a family riding out a storm with fire and blankets and the understanding that some problems don’t get solved tonight and that’s okay.
We sit. The fire crackles. The snow hits the windows. The candlelight makes the living room look like something from another century.
Kaiden clears his throat. “I can’t wait anymore.”
I look at him. “For the power? It’s been like five minutes, Kaid.”
He shakes his head. Reaches into his pocket. Pulls out a small black velvet box. My heart does something architectural—a structural rearrangement that makes breathing temporarily optional.
“It’s not what you think,” he says. Quickly. Reading my face. “And I got permission from everyone in this room. Actually—” He glances at Callum. “It was my dad’s idea.”
He opens the box. Inside, catching the firelight: a ring. Rose gold. The design is unmistakable—two hands cradling a heart, a crown above it. A small diamond set into the center of the heart, catching the flame like a trapped star.
“A Claddagh ring,” I say. My voice is not steady.
Kaiden takes it out. Takes my right hand. Slides it onto my ring finger—heart facing inward, toward my wrist. The traditional position: “This heart is taken.”
“The heart is love,” he says. “The crown is loyalty. The hands are friendship. Right now, it’s a promise ring. A promise that you’re my forever, Cat. Not someday-maybe forever. Actual forever. The kind that survives different cities and grad school and all the things we haven’t figured out yet.”