1. Penelope #3
She showed up at the end of first semester—at the Monaghans’ New Year’s Eve party, all smiles and wandering hands, introducing herself by hitting on Kaiden in front of Cat like she wanted to test exactly how fast a person could get murdered in a kitchen.
Nobody knew then that she was Lucian Anderson’s new stepdaughter.
That her mother, Veronica, had married Xander’s father before Adeena’s body was cold.
That Valentina would be living in the Anderson house, sleeping in Adeena’s reading room, walking the halls where Xander’s mother had spent the last years of her life slowly disappearing until the rope and the closet made the disappearance permanent.
It’s only a matter of time before Cat explodes and beats the ever-living shit out of her. I’m not going to stop it. I’m going to sell tickets.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. Highway to local roads, then the winding streets of our neighborhood—stone walls, iron gates, houses that sit on acres instead of lots.
Edgewood money. Old money and new money and political money, all of it insulated behind hedgerows and security systems and the mutual agreement that appearances matter more than truth.
I turn the music up. I always turn the music up.
It’s the one thing that still works—not the pills, not the smile, not the performance.
Music. The right song at the right volume can overwrite anything.
Right now it’s Deftones—“Change (In the House of Flies)”—because Chino Moreno’s voice does something to my nervous system that pharmaceuticals can’t replicate.
Slows me down. Fills the empty spaces with sound instead of silence.
Reminds me that there is beauty in the dark and it doesn’t all have to hurt.
But today, even the music can’t stop the images.
Being pulled out of a van. Zip ties on my wrists.
The Pennington basement—cold, wet, the smell of bleach and earth.
Jon’s face above me—the senator’s son, the boy who wore a public face so convincing that every parent in Edgewood thought he was “a nice boy from a good family.” But I saw the other face.
The one underneath. The one that smiled while he hit me because I was in the way of what he really wanted, which was Cat, which was always Cat.
And his father. Alastair. The puppet master.
The man who orchestrated everything—the blackmail of Cat’s family, the surveillance, the kidnapping—with the calm efficiency of someone managing a business deal.
He’d stand in the corner and watch while Jon worked.
Just watching. Adjusting his cufflinks. Giving notes, like it was a rehearsal.
And before all of them—before Jon, before Alastair, before the basement—there was Garrett.
The oldest Pennington son. The one nobody talks about now because Cat put three bullets in him and he died on her parents’ kitchen floor.
But I remember Garrett. I remember him from before he changed his name and moved to Connecticut and became the monster who tortured Cat for years.
I remember him as the older kid at neighborhood parties who always wanted to hang out with the younger ones.
The one who cornered me after lacrosse practice when I was thirteen and tried to—
Don’t. Don’t go there.
Xander stopped him. Xander was thirteen years old and he picked up a lacrosse stick and beat Garrett Pennington unconscious because something was happening to me and that was the only language Xander knew for making it stop.
That’s the thing that broke us—not the distance, not his mother’s death, not the fighting or the drugs.
The thing that broke Xander and me was a lacrosse field and a predator and a boy who saved me and could never look at me the same way again.
Garrett is dead. Jon and Alastair are in prison—life sentences, no parole.
The Pennington dynasty dismantled in a single semester.
It was all over the news for weeks—the state senator’s son convicted of kidnapping and assault, the patriarch exposed as the architect of a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political family, the oldest son’s history of predation finally dragged into the light.
Edgewood Prep sent a letter to all families.
Counselors were made available. An assembly was held.
“We stand with the victims,” the headmaster said, without naming us, as if our anonymity was a gift rather than another form of erasure.
They’re locked up. It’s over. Everyone says it’s over. But it is not over.
It lives in my body. In the way I flinch when someone touches my arm without warning.
In the nightmares that play on repeat—Cat’s screams through the wall, the needle puncturing my skin, the chemical burn of whatever they injected to keep me quiet and compliant.
In the phantom sensations that ambush me at random—the zip ties on my wrists, the cold of the basement floor through my clothes, Alastair’s shadow in the doorway while Jon focused on Cat and I lay on the concrete praying they’d forget I was there.
Cat went through worse. I know this. Cat was on that floor longer. Cat took the brunt of what the Penningtons had to give. And Cat is healing—therapy, Darla, Kaiden, the steady reconstruction of a girl who refuses to be defined by the worst thing that happened to her.
I should be healing too. I have the same resources. The same therapist. The same friends. The same parents who love me and would do anything to help if I let them.
But Cat processes her darkness by facing it.
I process mine by drugging it into silence.
And the gap between those two approaches is widening every day, and I can feel Cat watching me across it, trying to figure out why I’m not getting better, and I can’t tell her the truth because the truth would make her worry and she’s been through enough and she doesn’t need my shit on top of her own.
I’m fine. I’m handling it. I just need a little help, and the pills are the help, and it’s temporary, and I can stop whenever I want.
The lies addicts tell themselves. I know they’re lies.
I tell them anyway. Because the alternative—admitting that I’m not fine, that I’m not handling it, that the “little help” has become the only thing standing between me and the full weight of what happened in that basement—is a door I am not ready to open.
I pull into the driveway. Our house is warm stone and copper gutters, a wraparound porch that my mom decorates for every season—right now it’s bare winter branches in white pots, tasteful, the kind of seasonal decor that costs more than some people’s rent.
The heated driveway has already melted this morning’s snow.
My dad’s restored Shelby sits in the third garage bay, gleaming under the lights.
A house that smells like turpentine and fresh bread because my mom paints in the studio above the garage and my dad bakes when he’s stressed and I grew up in the kind of home that other kids describe as “perfect.”
Perfect house. Perfect parents. Perfect life. Imperfect girl rotting quietly inside it.
I grab my bag and head inside, making a beeline for the stairs. I’m almost to my room when my mom pokes her head out of her studio.
“Hey, Penny! How was school?”
“Fine.” The word is automatic. A reflex. “Just gonna do some homework before dinner.”
“Sounds good, baby.”
I close my bedroom door. Lock it. Go to my desk drawer and pull out the baggy. Thirteen pills. I count them twice. Thirteen. Five days until the weekend, when I can see Reece. Thirteen pills, two a day, that’s six and a half days. I have margin. Not much, but enough.
I put the bag back. I don’t take one. I just needed to count them. To know they’re there. The knowing is almost as good as the taking—the comfort of proximity, the assurance that when the noise gets too loud, the silence is within reach.
My phone buzzes.
Dad: Dinner in 30. Your mom made that pasta you like.
Mom didn’t make the pasta. Dad made the pasta.
Dad always makes the pasta—he’s the cook, mom is the artist, and this has been running in our family since I was old enough to eat solid food.
I smile—a real one, small, the kind that nobody sees because I’m alone in my room and there’s nobody to perform for.
I change into sweats. Wash my face. Check my nose for residue. Head downstairs.
Dinner is what dinner has always been in the MacHale house—warm, noisy, my dad making terrible jokes that my mom pretends to hate, the kitchen full of steam and the smell of garlic and the pure chaos of a family that actually likes each other.
Dad is plating pasta. Mom is pouring wine.
The kitchen island is set for three, and the fact that it’s only three now—no Xander in the fourth seat, no more Friday night dinners where he’d show up and my parents would feed him and my dad would give him shit about his music taste and my mom would ask about his art and he’d leave at ten looking like a person who’d been reminded that love exists—the fact that the fourth seat is empty makes me grip my fork too hard.
“Anything exciting happen at school?” Dad asks, twirling his pasta.
“Define exciting.”
“Anything that would make the news?”
“No. Very boring. Very normal. Very much a school where children learn things.”
Mom laughs. Dad shakes his head. The performance is seamless. I’ve been performing normally for so long that I barely notice the effort anymore.
Mom sets her wine down and looks at me with that expression – the one that means she’s about to ask something I don’t want to answer. “What’s going on with Xander? I haven’t seen you two together in months.”
And there it is.
“He’s busy.”
“Busy?” Mom’s eyebrow rises. “That boy has practically lived at this house since he was born. He hasn’t been ‘busy’ a day in his life.”
“Well, things change. His mom died. His dad married Veronica. He’s dealing with a lot.”