She didn’t know the unborn baby; didn’t even know the gender or a name yet. She did enjoy watching Naz and Roz together, but especially when they didn’t know she was watching, because she couldn’t remember seeing two people who treated each other with such love and care before. Her mother and father had never been like that ... more transactional. Everything was an equal give and take or even a negotiation. All business.
She hadn’t realized relationships weren’t really like that, but she wasn’t surprised to learn something else about her parents’ marriage had been manufactured.
“Your father isn’t here. Do you extend the same lack of emotion to the man who raped and sold your body because he isn’t present, either?”
Fuck.
Nice segue, Penny thought. The therapist wasn’t getting smarter about how she did that. The entire reason she was sitting in this office and the one thing she didn’t want to talk about was the sexual abuse she suffered through with her father.
Hadn’t she talked enough?
She was silent for years.
Then, all it took was the mental ward overseas suggesting that she would be transferred back to the care of her mother and father for the floodgates to open. No way in hell was she going back to them. She had finally been free, for all purposes. Her parents were satisfied to send her brand of trouble all the way across the world, far away from them.
She liked that fine, too.
Except once she started talking about the things her father had done to her from the time she was two ... well, it didn’t stop. A doctor turned into another doctor that wanted to take notes. And then a bobby arrived because the doctors had to report it. One officer turned into two, and then the Americans got involved because the majority of abuse took place in Jersey.
She thought one person would be enough, but no. Penny couldn’t be so lucky. Now there were fifty hours or more of videotapes with recordings of her speaking in detail about the abuse she suffered for years. Videotapes that they planned to show at her father’s trail—if she wasn’t called to testify herself.
Christ.
She talked enough.
Penny didn’t want to keep doing it.
“Penny?” the therapist asked softly. “You’re very tense over there. Can you let go of your hand for me? I can see the way you’re digging your fingernails into the side of your palm. Take a second if you need it.”
She needed far more than a second.
A million minutes.
A new memory.
A whole new life.
Except that wouldn’t happen.
She was who she was.
Fucked up.
Broken inside and out.
Tired of all of it.
Eventually, Penny did let go of her hand, ignoring the three, deep red crescent marks she had damn near cut through the skin that were left behind. Thankfully, the therapist didn’t continue pressing the topic of Preston Dunsworth. Instead, she moved onto something else that was just about as bad on Penny’s fuck no radar.
“How do you feel about your mother—Allegra—not attempting to gain custody of you back from your current guardians? I hear you got the news about that development recently, right?”
God.
The woman was a dog digging for a bone. And any bone would do even if it was one she bit out of Penny’s body to gnaw on. Because that’s exactly how this felt. Yet another reason why she hated therapy with Dr. Tangler. The only reason why she continued returning was the fact that she didn’t hate the doctor personally.
Only what she was trying to do—fix Penny.
She couldn’t be fixed.
“Penny, how do you feel—”
“I don’t,” she snapped.
“Don’t feel, you mean?”
“Not for her.”
She wouldn’t even say her mother’s name. Couldn’t. The pressure in her chest became painful along with the swell of memories that were now ever constant and always on replay in the back of her mind. All these people wanted her to do was remember.
Penny needed to forget.
“She’s your mother. You’re her only child. And you’re not at all affected that she’s effectively orphaned you to the state?” the woman asked.
“No.”
And if Penny were considered mentally stable enough for a proper emancipation, then she would have tried for that, too. That was that. What else needed said?
Penny continued staring at the reflection in the glass, comforted more by the sight of her wide, haunted blue eyes than anything else. You look like an angel, her father would tell her. People pay for the way you look, Penny. She didn’t see that at all, only pain.
At least, her stare didn’t lie. Everything anyone needed to know was always staring back at them. She was happy, at least, that the last bit of yellowish bruising on her neck had finally disappeared over the last week. It had been the only reminder of her last suicide attempt.
One of many.
This time would have worked if not for Roz ... and Kyle, too, a mentor who had been trying to help Penny overseas. He was long gone, though, back to wherever he spent his days. And she was left with Roz and Naz while the bruises faded from the rope she had tied perfectly.
Penny didn’t know whether she was happy or not that they saved her. Everybody says a person only wants to die until they are dying, but she didn’t remember it that way.
That was part of her depression, she knew. The disconnect. Her lack of desire to talk or even be present. How she would much rather hide beneath blankets or in clothes that drowned her body.
Not soon enough for her liking, the second hand of the clock finally ticked down the last minute of her required therapy session. Another form would be filled out and sent to the social worker to say Penny and her guardians were doing all the work demanded of them to ensure her mental health and well-being.
But as she stood to leave, Dr. Tangler asked, “One to ten this week?”
She didn’t need to clarify what she meant. Penny understood.
“Eight.”
“That’s high on the scale.”
“Not the nine it was last week,” Penny returned.
“Do you have an active plan?”
“No.”
Not one for suicide, anyway.
“Self-harm?” the therapist asked.
It took every ounce of self-control Penny had not to rub at the black, long-sleeve sweater covering her arms. Even the denim of her skinny jeans itched overtop the scars she hid with clothing. The mere mention of her habit to cut was enough to make her want to do it. Numbness would follow—it was all she really wanted.
“Not lately,” she said honestly.
Penny couldn’t say how long it would last.
The therapist didn’t ask.
“I’ll see you next week,” the woman said as Penny left the room.
Maybe, she replied silently. She didn’t make promises and while she might not be actively planning another suicide attempt, she also didn’t plan for anything else, either. Wishful thinking, perhaps. Or it could just be her depression talking again.
That bitch never left.
And neither did—
“How did it go?” Roz asked the second Penny emerged from the office’s back hallway. She stood from the waiting room’s chair, offering one of her smiles. A warm, comforting sight. Like everything else about Rosalynn Puzza. She just ... drew people in—made them feel safe. Including Penny, but it was hard to trust that. “Okay, I hope.”