7. Penelope
My parents are sitting on my bed when Xander drops me off.
Not standing. Not pacing. Sitting. Side by side on the edge of my mattress like two people in a waiting room who’ve been told the doctor is coming but don’t know yet whether the news is survivable.
My dad’s hands are in his lap—still, clasped, the measured control of a man who runs crisis communication for a living and is currently experiencing a crisis he cannot communicate his way out of.
My mom’s eyes are red. Her mascara is gone.
She’s been crying the kind of crying that strips you down to the raw face underneath the art.
I stand in the doorway of my own bedroom and feel like a stranger in my own house.
“Sit down, Penny.” My dad. Quiet. Not the quiet of anger—the quiet of a man who is choosing every word with the care of someone defusing a bomb, because one wrong syllable could detonate the girl in front of him and he knows it.
I sit. On the desk chair. Across from them. The distance between us—three feet of hardwood floor—feels like a canyon.
Nobody speaks for a long time. The house makes its house sounds—the heater cycling on, the ice maker in the kitchen dropping a load, the hum of a home that is functioning normally while the people inside it are not.
My mom breaks first.
“We’re not angry, Penny.” Her voice is wrecked. Sandpapered by hours of crying. “We need you to know that first. Before anything else is said in this room. We are not angry at you.”
“What are you, then?”
She looks at my dad. He looks at her. The exchange of parents who have been discussing their child behind closed doors and are now presenting a unified front that is held together with tape and terror.
“Scared,” my dad says. “We’re scared, Penny.
The photos—the school called. The guidance counselor called.
A reporter from the Edgewood Standard called because apparently when a senator’s son goes to prison for kidnapping, every student connected to the victims becomes public property.
” He pauses. The pause of a man who is about to say the hard thing.
“And then you called your mother and told her you weren’t coming home, and we—”
His voice breaks. Gideon MacHale’s voice breaks, and I have never—not once, not in eighteen years, not during the kidnapping, not during the hospital, not during the trial—heard my father’s voice break.
“Daddy—”
“We thought you were going to hurt yourself.” He says it flat.
Direct. The public relations specialist delivering a fact.
“When you said ‘I’m not coming home’—Penny, your mother and I sat in this house and looked at each other and thought our daughter was going to hurt herself, and we didn’t know where you were, and we couldn’t reach you, and the last time we couldn’t reach you, you were in a basement with zip ties on your wrists. ”
The sentence hits me in the chest. Not like a punch—like a collapse.
Internal. The implosion of realizing that your pain is not contained.
It has leaked. It has soaked through the walls you built and into the people on the other side, and they have been absorbing it in silence because the therapist said “give her space” and they have been giving me space and the space has become a void and now we’re all standing at the edge of it.
“I wasn’t going to—I just needed to not be here for a minute. I needed—”
“What did you need, baby?” My mom. Soft. The voice she uses when she’s trying to open a door without making it feel like a door. “You can say it. Whatever it is, you can say it in this room.”
The truth sits in my throat like a bone. Too big to swallow. Too sharp to spit out.
“I went to Reece’s house.”
My mom’s face doesn’t change. My dad’s jaw tightens.
“For drugs, Penny?” Dad. Gentle. The gentleness that costs him everything.
“Yes.”
My mom’s hand goes to her mouth. Not shock—grief. The grief of a mother who suspected and hoped she was wrong and is now being told she was right.
“How long?”
“Since October. Since the kidnapping.”
My dad closes his eyes. Opens them. “What are you taking?”
“Percocet. Oxy. Whatever Reece has.”
The room absorbs the words. My mom’s tears fall silently—not the heaving kind, the leaking kind. The kind that come from a place so deep they don’t need sound.
My phone rings. Cat’s name on the screen. I look at my parents. My dad nods.
I answer. Speaker.
“Penny! Xander was arrested. Iz called Kaid. Arthur and Darla are on their way to the station.”
I sit up. “What? Why?”
“He and his dad got into it. Like physically. Cops came. Pepper spray, taser, the whole thing.” Her voice shifts. Hardens. “Also—your car is here. At our house. Iz picked it up from Reece’s. Because apparently that’s where you were, Penny. At Reece’s fucking house. Again.”
“Cat, I—”
“I saw the pictures.” Her voice cracks. Not anger—something under the anger.
“The GlossX photos from Reece’s. You on his lap.
You dancing on the table. You screaming ‘fuck you, X.’ I saw all of it, Penny, and I—” She stops.
Breathes. The exhale is ragged. “I want my best friend back. I want the girl who showed up at Edgewood with teal streaks and combat boots and told me her dead grandmother was nice. I want the girl who sat next to me when nobody else would. Where is she, Penny? Where did she go?”
The tears come. Mine. Hers. Through the phone speaker, I can hear Cat crying—the real kind, the uncontrolled kind, the kind that Cat O’Farrell does not allow anyone to witness except Kaiden and, apparently, me.
“I’m sorry, Cat. I’m so sorry. I know you’re angry—”
“I’m not angry. I’m terrified. There’s a difference. Angry I can handle. Terrified means I’m watching you disappear and I can’t reach you and it’s the basement all over again except this time the person locking you in is you.”
My mom reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“I’m talking to my parents right now,” I say. “About everything. I’m—I’m trying, Cat.”
Silence. Then, quieter: “Okay. That’s—okay. Call me when you can. I love you, Penny. Even when you make it really hard.”
“I love you too.”
She hangs up. The room is quiet.
My dad leans forward. “Xander was arrested?”
“His dad, Lucian. They fought. Like—physically. Cops came.”
My dad and mom exchange the look again. The look of parents who have been watching Lucian Anderson from across the street for eighteen years and are not surprised.
My mom shifts closer to me. Takes both my hands in hers. Her fingers are cold. She’s been clenching them.
“Penny, I need to tell you something. Something I’ve never told you because I thought I was protecting you by keeping it to myself, and I’m realizing now that protection without honesty is just a prettier kind of cage.”
My dad sits back. He knows what she’s about to say. I can tell by the way his hand finds the back of her neck—supportive, steadying. He’s heard this before.
“When I was your age—maybe a year older, nineteen—I was at RISD. Art school. Surrounded by the most talented, brilliant, self-destructive people you’ve ever met.
The art world runs on suffering, Penny. It fetishizes it.
The best artists are the broken ones, the tortured ones, the ones who can translate pain into paint.
And I was good. I was very good. But I wasn’t broken enough, so I—” She stops.
Breathes. “I broke myself. On purpose. Because the work I made when I was numb was better than the work I made when I was sober, and I wanted to be better, and the pills made me better, and the pills were so easy to get and so easy to hide and so easy to justify because everybody was doing it and the professors were doing it and the culture was doing it and I woke up one morning and realized I couldn’t paint without them.
Couldn’t eat without them. Couldn’t exist without them. ”
I stare at my mother. Alice MacHale. The woman who paints in the studio above the garage and hangs her work in galleries and makes everything beautiful and has never, in my entire life, appeared to be anything other than whole.
“You?”
“Me.” She smiles. The sad kind. The kind that has history in it.
“Cocaine, mostly. Some pills. For two years, Penny. Two years of my life that I barely remember because I was so deep in it that the days blurred together like a painting left in the rain. I almost died twice. The second time, my roommate found me on the bathroom floor and called an ambulance, and I spent three days in a hospital bed looking at the ceiling and realizing that the art I was making wasn’t better.
It was just louder. And loud isn’t the same as good. ”
My dad’s hand is on her back now. Rubbing slow circles. The same motion Xander uses on me when I’m breaking. The same motion I’ve apparently inherited from watching this man love this woman for my entire life.
“How did you stop?” I whisper.
“I didn’t stop all at once. I stopped, and started again, and stopped, and started again.
I went to rehab and left early. I tried therapy and quit after three sessions.
I relapsed at a gallery opening and ended up in the ER.
It took me four tries, Penny. Four. And even now—even twenty years later—there are days when the craving shows up uninvited and sits in my chest and dares me to give in. ”
“But you don’t.”
“But I don’t. Because I have your father. And I have you. And the life I built without the drugs is so much louder than anything I could have made with them.”
My dad pulls me into his chest. My mom wraps around both of us. A three-person knot of arms and tears and the particular intimacy of a family that is, for the first time, telling the truth in the same room at the same time.