8. Xander
Arthur Walsh is the kind of lawyer who makes bail feel like a personal favor the justice system is granting on his behalf.
He shows up at the station in a three-piece suit at eleven p.m. on a weeknight, speaks to the booking officer with the calm of a man who has done this a thousand times and has never lost, and has me processed and walking out the door in under forty minutes.
First offense. Low bail. The charges will be challenged—Arthur is already building the case in his head, I can see it in his eyes, the particular focus of a lawyer who is personally invested and professionally insulted.
Iz is waiting in the parking lot. Leaning against his car.
He drove it here—got the keys from Kaiden, who got them from my jacket, which was confiscated and returned.
The fact that Iz thought to bring my car, that he knew I’d need the ability to leave on my own terms, tells me everything about Issac Walsh that words never could.
“You look like shit,” he says.
“Feel like it too.”
He hugs me. Brief. Hard. The particular compression of a boy who has been holding his worry in his chest all night and is releasing it through his arms. Then he steps back. Hands me my keys.
“Mom wants to see you tomorrow. Not optional.”
“Darla?”
“She’s already making calls. An outpatient program. Local. You stay in school, stay wherever you’re staying, and do the work. She’s putting it together tonight.”
“Iz—”
“Don’t argue. You asked for help. This is what help looks like. Get some sleep. And X?” He opens his car door. Looks at me across the roof. “You’re not alone.I know I said it on the phone, but I need you to hear it when you can see my face. You are not alone.”
He drives away. I stand in the parking lot and breathe.
The Anderson estate is lit up like a stage set.
Every window blazing. The driveway floodlights on. The illumination of a household that is not welcoming someone home but preparing a departure—like a theater after the final curtain, all the lights turned up so the crew can see what needs to be struck.
And sitting on it are bags. Duffel bags.
Garbage bags. A laundry basket full of clothes.
A box of books. Another box that I can see from here contains the few things from my room that were actually mine—a lacrosse trophy, a framed photo, a blanket that doesn’t smell like Adeena anymore but that I kept because the shape of her was still in the wool.
Lucian is on the front steps. Arms crossed. Veronica beside him in a silk robe, wine in hand even at this hour, the endurance of a woman who treats her husband’s cruelty like a spectator sport and brings refreshments.
Valentina is in the doorway behind them. Phone out. Of course.
I walk up the driveway. Stop at the base of the steps. Look at my belongings scattered across the pavement like the remnants of an explosion—which, in a way, they are.
“Your bags are packed with what would fit,” Lucian says. Conversational. Bored. The tone of a man concluding a transaction. “The rest is on the ground. You are no longer welcome in this home.”
“This was never a home.”
Veronica steps forward. “This is exactly why. No respect. No gratitude. We opened our—”
“You opened nothing. You moved into a dead woman’s house and replaced her curtains and pulled out her rosebushes and put your daughter in her reading room. You didn’t open anything. You consumed it.”
Veronica’s face hardens. The performance of offense. “You are a disturbed young man, Xander. I hope wherever you end up, they have the resources to deal with someone like you.”
“Someone like me.” I look at Lucian. At the man who made me. “You mean someone like her. Like Adeena. That’s what you’re really saying—that I’m my mother’s son and you’re getting rid of me the same way you got rid of her. Except she had to hang herself to leave. I get to drive.”
The sentence lands on Lucian’s face and stays there. I watch it register—not guilt, Lucian doesn’t feel guilt—but the discomfort of a man who has been named, accurately, by a boy he taught to be quiet.
Valentina lowers her phone. Even she knows this moment isn’t content. This moment is something else.
I pick up the bags. Load them into the backseat. Shove the boxes into the trunk. The lacrosse trophy goes on the passenger seat. The blanket goes on my lap.
I get in the car. Start the engine. And because I am Xander Anderson and I am my mother’s son and I am done being quiet—I reverse directly onto Lucian’s pristine lawn.
The tires chew through the dead January grass, leaving deep trenches in the soil he pays a landscaping company twelve thousand dollars a year to maintain.
I spin the wheel. The mud flies. The grass tears.
In the rearview mirror: Lucian, screaming. Veronica, clutching her robe. Valentina with her phone up, recording.
I drive.
I’m on Route 1 heading nowhere when my phone rings.
Alice.
I stare at the screen. The name glowing in the dark car.
The name of a woman who taught me to bake bread and hung my drawings on her refrigerator and let me sleep in her guest room when my own house wasn’t safe.
The name of a woman whose daughter I destroyed in a closet and humiliated in a pool house and abandoned in a hallway this morning.
I don’t want to answer. I don’t deserve to answer. The coward in me—the Lucian in me—wants to let it ring and keep driving into the dark.
I answer. “Alice—”
“Xander.” She’s beyond crying. She’s in the place past crying, where the voice goes flat and the breathing is controlled because the alternative is screaming.
“The school called. Penny left campus. Again. Her phone is off. She’s not with Cat.
She’s not answering anyone. Gideon is driving around looking for her car and I’m at home and I can’t—I can’t just sit here, Xander.
I can’t sit here and not know where my daughter is. ”
“Alice, I—” I swallow. The words fight me. “We’re not—Penny and I aren’t friends right now. I don’t think I’m the person who should—”
“Xander Anderson.” Her voice changes. Not angry.
Desperate. The desperation of a mother who has exhausted every option and is reaching for the last one.
“I don’t care what happened between you two.
I don’t care about the fighting or the photos or any of it.
You know my daughter. You have known her since the day you were born.
You know where she goes when she’s scared.
You know the places she hides. I am begging you, Xander. Please. Please help me find my baby.”
The word “please” from Alice MacHale’s mouth.
The woman who raised me alongside her own daughter.
The woman who made a place at her table for me every Friday night for thirteen years without ever being asked.
The woman I called Mama MacHale when I was four because I didn’t understand yet that not all mothers were interchangeable and hers was the one whose kitchen smelled like bread and paint and safety.
“Mama MacHale.” The childhood name. It falls out before I can stop it—the word that lived in my mouth when the world was three blocks and a swing set. “I’m coming. Five minutes. Don’t call the cops yet. Let me try first.”
She makes a sound on the other end—relief and fear braided together, the exhale of a person who has been holding her breath and is not yet sure the air will hold.
I turn the car around. Push the accelerator. The MacHale house is eight minutes from where I am. I make it in four.
Alice is at the front door before I’m out of the car.
She comes down the steps and wraps her arms around me and she’s shaking—her whole body vibrating with the frequency of a parent in crisis.
Her face presses into my chest and she’s small, smaller than I remember, and for one terrible second I feel what it must be like to be the person Alice MacHale trusts to bring her daughter home.
“Thank you.” She says it into my shirt. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Gideon appears in the doorway. He’s still in his work clothes—the public relations specialist who manages other people’s crises for a living, currently unable to manage his own. His face is gray. His eyes are red.
“She didn’t take her car,” he says. “It’s here. She left on foot. In this weather, without a coat—” His jaw tightens. The sentence is too much to finish.
I step past them into the house. The kitchen. The living room. Her bedroom—empty, bed unmade, the clothes she wore to school this morning in a pile on the floor. Not here.
I go outside. The backyard. The cold hits me like a hand. I light a cigarette—the last one in the pack, the one I’ve been saving because the ritual of smoking is its own kind of grounding. I inhale. Look around.
Snow. Fresh, the kind that fell in the last few hours—light, powdery, covering the older layer beneath. The yard is white and still and—
Footprints.
Fresh. Leading from the back door toward the tree line. Small—Converse-sized. One set. Going in one direction.
Something glints in the snow near the edge of the tree line. I walk over. Pick it up. A small enamel pin—a music note, teal. From Penny’s backpack. The one she clips to the zipper. It’s in the snow because she walked this way and something snagged and she didn’t notice or didn’t care.
The treehouse.
The word arrives in my body before my brain.
The body knows. The body has known since Alice’s call.
Penny is in the treehouse because the treehouse is the last place we were okay—the last geography of innocence, the wooden box in the oak tree where two kids used to hide from the world and the world couldn’t find them.
I throw the cigarette. Follow the footprints. Through the yard, past the tree line, into the woods. The path we wore into the ground over years of childhood—still visible under the snow, a depression in the earth that no amount of winter can fill.
The treehouse. Fifteen feet up. The ladder. The door.