Penny shrugged. “Like it usually does.”
“I know you don’t like coming here but—”
“Required by the state and child services,” she interjected, parroting the same shit everybody told her. “I know, Roz.”
Plus, it kept her accountable.
Not that Penny would admit it. Then, people might think it was helping. Nothing helped.
Roz joined Penny’s side as they left the office, stepping out into a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Life bustled all around them, but she felt distanced from it all. Another day alive.
“I know things are going to be busy for the next month while we move into the new house,” Roz said, “but your seventeenth birthday is less than a week away.”
“And?”
A car pulled up for them.
She didn’t ask why Roz had drivers. Or why there were men with guns that kept an eye on the house. Never mind the fact that the last names of her guardians seemed to draw a sense of respect and caution everywhere they went.
“I thought maybe you might want to do something for it,” Roz explained.
“Not really.”
“Not even dinner?”
Penny sighed. “A day off therapy.”
Roz laughed lightly. “Sorry, one thing I can’t do.”
Right.
But her guardians tried to do everything else and that’s what counted. After years of people only hurting Penny, she finally had someone—two people, really—who seemed to actually care. She wasn’t used to that.
“I think I just want to sleep,” Penny said.
“Okay. But if you need anything, even while we’re busy moving, just tell me. We’ll make it happen, Penny.”
Yeah.
She knew.
They just couldn’t give her what she needed the most: everything to be gone.
THE THING ABOUT DEPRESSION? That shit was a cloud. Heavy, opaque, and constant. It followed Penny around, through days that turned into weeks, and melted into months. Time became irrelevant when she was fighting just to make it from one hour to the next.
Before she realized it, two months had passed her by. Two months on top of the two she had already been living in New York with her new guardians. She only came to that understanding because of the DA currently talking at the kitchen table of Roz and Naz’s new house.
“We were happy to be able to get this done and settled in such a short time—four months for a case like this is unheard of—so we were happy to agree to the deal with Preston Dunsworth considering the trail would have dragged on for possibly ... years.”
“Wait,” Penny muttered, stopping the DA from saying anything more about this deal they had settled out with her monster of a father and his horrible fucking lawyers. “Go back—so what you’re saying is that he’ll plead guilty to eighty-five counts of child pornography, right?”
“Yes,” the man across the table said.
Underneath, where no one could see, Roz’s hand squeezed tightly around Penny’s. An ache had settled deep in her heart. Despite the fact she actually hadn’t needed to see or speak to her father since this whole thing started ... every time she had to talk about him, or he was brought into a conversation, she felt ill.
She didn’t want to think about him anymore. He didn’t deserve a space in her mind.
So, why was he still there?
Penny couldn’t cut him out.
She tried.
“The deal says each count will have time served consecutively, and not together,” the DA said, like Penny was a fucking idiot and needed it explained to her again. She heard it just fine the first fucking time. “With the maximum penalty for each charge, that could add up to over—”
“Just shut up,” Penny said.
The man gave her a look. “Excuse me?”
“Penny,” Roz said quietly beside her. “It’s okay ... try to say what you’re feeling, and not just try to hurt someone else because we’re hurting, right?”
God.
Why did Roz have to be like ... that?
All the time, too.
“I think,” came the dark voice of Naz behind Penny where he leaned against the wall of the kitchen in their new—because a baby needed lots of space, apparently—home, “what Penny is not quite saying but wants to, is that it’s just the child porn charges, correct?”
“Yes, those are charges that will be impossible for them to win against.”
“And nothing for her.”
The man across the table stiffened. “Well—”
Naz didn’t allow the man to continue on with whatever in the fuck he planned to say before he added, “So, perhaps you could forgive Penny that you made a deal with the man who raped her, and sold her body for years, wherein he will plead guilty to everything but what he did to her. Because you see, the only reason why you were able to get the child porn and charge him for that was because she came forward ... she talked, again and again and again. You put her on tape, you made her relive trauma to stranger after stranger. You put her in front of therapist after therapist to see if she was lying. You promised justice would be served for her.”
“Sir—”
“And in fact,” Naz continued, “what you did was use her to get what you could from him, and instead of getting her abuser on the stand to admit to what he did to her, she instead gets to feel like everything she did was not actually for her own benefit. So yeah, I think you could empathize with why she needs you to explain again the choice you made. And without the attitude the second time around—go ahead, try it, Mr. Mahoney.”
The DA swallowed hard and stared at the wood grain on the dining room table they currently sat at. Roz squeezed Penny’s hand again, and she was eternally grateful for the support that she found in this house. It was strange to her in the way that those weren’t at all the things she had been expecting when she came to live here with Naz and Roz.
Penny had become so used to being alone—to feeling numb to all and anything in her life—that now, it felt like she experienced too much when it came to her emotions, and she didn’t know the first damn thing to do with them.
She was getting better, though.
One step at a time.
It was terrifying.
“Trial would be long,” the DA murmured, “and drawn out. Media would be all over it—constantly. Penny would likely have to testify. No doubt in front of a packed courtroom, we’d be lucky if we were able to get a media ban approved by the judge, and certainly in full view of her father where he could stare at her while she retold detail after detail of his abuse. Which, again no doubt, would be for his pleasure, and certainly not for hers. So yes, I understand that on the surface, this deal doesn’t exactly seem like it is to Penny’s benefit—”
“Not one bit,” Penny replied sharply.
“But your other options will be far more traumatic. He will die in prison, and it might not be because he admitted to the things he did to you, but it will be because of the strength and courage you have shown time and time again to make sure he couldn’t do this to someone else.”
Penny let out a shaky breath.
Why didn’t that help?
Wordlessly, Penny stood from the table. Roz looked her way, a silent request for her to stay and finish the conversation. It reflected in the woman’s eyes, but Penny couldn’t do what she wanted. Right now, she just needed to be alone ... or something.