Page 12 of One Breath After Another

“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?”