Prologue #4
The silence hits like a slap. The filthy closet rushes back—the bare bulb, the bleach, the concrete, the muffled roar of the crowd on the other side of the walls.
My hands are shaking. I pull out and the emptiness is immediate—clinical, animal, the hollow that follows an act that was everything and nothing simultaneously.
I step back. Pull my shorts up.
I didn’t ask if she wanted this. I didn’t ask if she was on birth control. I didn’t use a condom. I didn’t check if she was okay. I didn’t slow down. I didn’t ask. I just took.
Penny pulls her jeans up. Fixes her bra. Pulls her shirt down. Her hands are trembling. She wipes a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand—quick, practiced, the muscle memory of a girl who’s learned to cry without being seen.
“Penny—”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. Her voice is small but her jaw is set and her chin is up and she is holding herself together with the particular force of will that Penny MacHale has weaponized since childhood. “Just—don’t.”
Neither of us speaks. I move the crate. Open the door. The hallway is empty. We walk out.
November in Massachusetts.
Our breath hangs in the air between us as we walk to my car.
Penny’s arms are wrapped around herself—not cold, protective.
The body language of a person holding her own pieces together.
I want to put my jacket around her. I want to touch her shoulder.
I want to say something that undoes the last twenty minutes and puts us back on the swings with the pink backpack and the friendship bracelets and the version of us that hadn’t learned yet that love and damage could live in the same body.
I don’t.
We get in the car. I start the engine. Blast the heat because she’s shivering and my body knows her body’s preferences before my mind gives permission—heat on high, passenger vent angled toward her, the choreography of eighteen years of knowing someone.
The drive home takes twenty minutes. Highway, then local roads, then the winding tree-lined streets of Edgewood where the houses sit behind iron gates and stone walls and the kind of manicured hedgerows that cost more to maintain than most people’s mortgages.
This is where we grew up—this pocket of old New England money and new tech money and political money, all of it insulated behind acreage and alarm systems and the mutual agreement that what happens inside these houses stays inside these houses.
Penny’s house is warm stone and copper gutters and a wraparound porch that Alice—her mom—decorates for every season.
Right now it’s pumpkins and mums and the kind of tasteful Halloween garland that costs more than my car payment.
The driveway is heated—no ice, no snow, the luxury of a family that can afford to make winter a minor inconvenience.
The porch light is on. Alice always leaves the porch light on.
Every night. No matter what time Penny comes home. The light stays on.
It’s the kind of detail that makes me want to put my fist through the steering wheel because my mother used to leave lights on too. Before Lucian told her to stop wasting electricity. Before she stopped doing anything that might draw his attention. Before she stopped.
I pull into the driveway. The circular kind—stone-paved, lined with landscaping, Gideon’s restored Shelby in the third garage bay visible through the window.
A house that smells like paint thinner and fresh bread because Alice paints in the studio above the garage and Gideon bakes when he’s stressed and Penny grew up in the kind of home I used to sit in and ache for.
I reach into my wallet. Pull out cash. Hold it toward Penny without looking at her. “Here. For Plan B. I don’t want a fucking kid.”
The words come out in my father’s voice.
I hear it—the cadence, the coldness, the cruelty of a man handing a woman money and making it feel like a transaction.
I hear it and I can’t stop it because the darkness is loud and Lucian’s voice is the only one I know how to use when I’m trying to push someone far enough away that they can’t get hurt by what I’m becoming.
Penny stares at the money. Then at me.
“Fuck you, Xander.” Her voice is flat. Emptied out. The Penny who deflects with humor is gone. What’s left is the girl underneath—the one who just gave me something she can’t take back and is watching me put a price tag on it. “I don’t want your goddamn kid or your goddamn money.”
She opens the door. Gets out. Slams it hard enough to rock the car on its suspension.
I watch her walk to the front door. Watch the porch light catch the teal in her hair. Watch her disappear inside without looking back.
On her wrist—the last thing I see before the door closes—the friendship bracelet.
Faded. The colors we chose when we were seven, dulled to near-white by eleven years of wearing it every single day.
She still wears it. After everything I’ve done to her, after every wall I’ve built and every cruel thing I’ve said and the closet and the money and the voice that sounded like my father’s—she still wears it.
I look down at my own wrist. Same bracelet. Same faded colors. Same eleven years. I put the car in reverse. Pull out of the driveway that’s been my second home since before I could walk.
My house is six hundred yards down the same road. Same neighborhood. Same money. Different planet.
The Anderson estate is all glass and sharp angles—Lucian’s taste, not my mother’s.
She wanted a colonial with a garden. He built a monument.
Four thousand square feet of imported stone and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on nothing because Lucian doesn’t want to see the neighbors and doesn’t want the neighbors to see in.
The landscaping is architectural—no flowers, no color, just structured boxwoods and gravel and the kind of deliberate emptiness that rich men call “minimalist” and their wives call “lonely.”
My mother’s garden is already dead. Three weeks.
That’s how long it took Veronica to pull out Adeena’s rosebushes and replace them with decorative stone.
Three weeks to erase thirty years of a woman’s hands in the dirt.
The wind chimes are gone. The bird feeder is gone.
The welcome mat with my mother’s handwriting is gone.
I sit in the driveway and press my forehead to the steering wheel and think about the accelerator and the road and how easy it would be to just not turn.
To find a stretch of highway and push the needle past the point where the car stops being a car and becomes a projectile and the distance between here and not-here shrinks to nothing.
Nobody would miss me.
Kaiden would. For a while. But Kaiden has Cat now. He has the girl and the plan and the future and the momentum of a person whose damage is being rebuilt into something functional. He doesn’t need me. He needs me to be okay so he can stop worrying, which is different from needing me.
Iz would text for a few weeks. Then stop.
Danny would go quiet. But Danny’s already quiet. You can’t notice an absence in a silence.
Ryan would find out last. He always finds out last because he’s always looking at something else—or someone else.
A girl with dark eyes and a secret that’s eating her alive.
He’d be sad for a minute. Then he’d go back to trying to save her because that’s Ryan’s version of what I’m doing right now—driving toward the thing that’s going to kill you because the alternative is sitting still.
And Penny.
Penny would—
I can’t finish the thought. Because finishing it means imagining Penny at my funeral.
Penny in black. Penny holding a friendship bracelet that doesn’t have a matching half anymore.
Penny in the treehouse we built when we were nine, alone, playing songs on the little bluetooth speaker she carries everywhere—the one plastered with stickers, Bad Suns and Peach Pit and that Japanese band she tried to make me listen to for an entire summer.
She’d play something soft. Something that aches.
She’d know exactly which song, because Penny has a song for every feeling and she’d find the one that sounds like missing someone who chose to leave.
I can’t do that to her. Even now. Even when every cell in my body is screaming to stop existing. I can’t do to Penny what my mother did to me.
I lift my head from the steering wheel. Breathe. The breath shakes.
Inside the house, a light turns on. Valentina’s room.
Second floor, east wing—the room that used to be my mother’s reading room, with the window seat where she’d curl up with a book and a blanket and the quiet of a woman who was happiest when the world was small and contained and didn’t include Lucian.
Now it’s Valentina’s. The girl who showed up at the Monaghan’s New Year’s Eve party and introduced herself by putting her hand on Kaiden’s arm like she was staking a claim.
I didn’t know then that her mother had just married my father.
I didn’t know then that Valentina’s smile—perfect, practiced, predatory—would be the first thing I saw every morning in a house that no longer belonged to my mother.
I know now.
I get out of the car. Walk to the front door. Put my key in the lock of a house that feels like a stranger’s body—familiar architecture, wrong soul. The hallway is dark. Italian marble. Veronica’s taste—everything cold and expensive and echoing. I try to get upstairs without—
“Where have you been.”
Lucian. Kitchen doorway. Tumbler of scotch in his hand. The silhouette of a man who fills rooms by taking up all the air in them.
“Nowhere.”
“You smell like a sewer. And is that blood?”
“None of your business.”
I try to move past him. His hand catches my arm. The grip—tight, deliberate, the specific pressure that says “I own you” without words. I know this grip. I’ve known it since I was old enough to walk.
“You’re embarrassing this family, Xander.”
I look at his hand on my arm. Then at his face.
The face that used to terrify me. That still terrifies me, if I’m honest, but the terror has been buried under so many other things—grief, rage, the sixteen-day-old image of my mother’s feet in the closet—that it doesn’t reach the surface the way it used to.
“What family.”
I pull free. Walk upstairs. Close the door.
Lock it. Sit on the bed in a room that used to have my mother’s quilt on the chair and my mother’s watercolor on the wall and the faint smell of lavender hand cream on everything she touched.
All gone. Replaced by Veronica’s taste, which is expensive and empty and smells like nothing at all.
My phone buzzes.
Kaid: Just tell me you’re alive.
Me: Alive.
I don’t add: barely. I don’t add: I fucked Penny in a closet and then handed her money like my father would.
I don’t add: I’m turning into him and I can feel it happening and I can’t stop it and the only thing standing between me and the highway is a faded friendship bracelet on the wrist of a girl who deserves so much better than what I just did to her.
I look down at the bracelet. Touch it. The threads are soft from years of wear, the colors bled out to ghosts of what they were.
Penny chose teal. I chose yellow. And then she mixed the colors together. We tied them on each other’s wrists in the treehouse and she said, “Now we’re bonded forever,” and I said, “Forever is a long time,” and she said, “Exactly.”
I lie back on the bed. Stare at the ceiling. The house is quiet. The quiet that used to mean danger and now means absence—the absence of wind chimes and bird feeders and a mother’s voice calling my name up the stairs for dinner.
I close my eyes. The closet is there. It’s always there.
But tonight, mixed in with the rope and the silence and the bare feet, there’s something else.
The taste of strawberries and mint. The press of a body against mine.
The sound of my name in Penny’s mouth—not the way she said it in anger at the warehouse, or desperation in the closet.
The way she said it when we were kids. Like it was something worth saying.
Xander.
Not a prayer. Not yet. More like a question she’s been asking for five years and I’ve been refusing to answer.
Are you still in there?
I press the friendship bracelet against my lips. The threads taste like salt and skin and eleven years.
I don’t know, Penny. I don’t fucking know.