Page 9 of One Breath After Another

Penny didn’t want to be looked at. Not by anyone. If only everyone else felt the same way as her. Things would be far easier.

“Your life has been significantly changed in just two months,” the therapist said. “You went from living overseas and attending a prestigious private school for the musically inclined to returning back to the states with new guardians. All during handling the police’s investigation of your father. It isn’t surprising if things are a little ... overwhelming for you, Penny.”

“And it’s fine.”

Usually, but she didn’t add that out loud. It would only encourage the therapist to ask more or probe into the topic, and Penny didn’t want to talk in the first place. She was only here doing this because it was a demand made by the social worker that regularly showed up to check in on her and her new guardians.

Roz handled the bitch with grace.

Penny couldn’t say the same.

“How about the pregnancy? I understand you have no siblings, so Rosalynn—”

“I call her Roz. It’s what she likes.”

And since Penny liked Roz, she tried to do what the woman wanted. Like calling her by the name she preferred. It was a simple thing, sure, but if it was anyone else and she didn’t like them ... well, their life would be a far more miserable place.

“Roz, then,” the therapist was quick to say behind her, the scratching against paper telling Penny that the woman was writing on her notepad. “How do you feel about Roz’s pregnancy? Are you excited for the baby?”

She only shrugged.

“Miss Dunsworth, I don’t know what shrugs mean.”

Oh, yay.

She got the last name.

That usually meant the therapist was starting to catch on that Penny was going to spend their entire hour—one of three every week until the doctor and social worker believed she wasn’t a danger to herself anymore—deflecting everything she asked.

“You know,” the woman said, not unkindly, “the longer you drag on actually talking to me about certain things, the more time you’ll spend with me, Penny.”

Well ...

She had a point.

Not one Penny particularly liked. Then again, what did she like?

“I don’t know how I feel about the pregnancy,” Penny said, not bothering to respond to the obvious. “Roz is happy. She and Naz are planning a bunch of stuff. A move, and other shit. They don’t forget about me, though. It’s like ... not here, I guess? I can’t feel something for someone that’s not here, can I?”

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.