Page 10 of One Breath After Another

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.