8. Xander #3
Alice gasps. Gideon’s hand goes to his mouth. They didn’t know. They knew about Garrett’s arrest—everyone in Edgewood knew—but they didn’t know Penny was part of his history. They didn’t know their daughter was the girl in the sealed file.
I keep going. Adeena’s death. The closet.
The rope. Lucian calling the coroner instead of the hospital.
The pills—my pills, the Percocet, three days after I found her.
Reece. The fights. The debt that never shrinks.
The cage in Bridgeport where I let strangers punch me because pain was the only thing that overrode the image of my mother’s feet.
Then the closet. The other closet. The one at the warehouse.
I tell them what I did to their daughter—in a room full of the parents who raised me, I say the words: I had sex with Penny in a closet at an underground fight club.
I didn’t ask. I didn’t know she was a virgin.
I found out in the pool house when she told everyone.
And then I gave her money for Plan B and drove away.
The room is silent. Alice’s hands tighten on mine.
She doesn’t let go. That’s the thing—she doesn’t let go.
A mother hearing what a boy did to her daughter and not releasing his hands, because somewhere in the architecture of Alice MacHale’s heart there is a room that holds Xander Anderson alongside Penny, and the room has no walls between them.
I tell them about the cruelty. The GlossX photos. The pool house. “Slumming it.” The hallway this morning—Penny saying “please” and me walking away. Every wound I inflicted, catalogued, named, laid on the floor of this waiting room like evidence.
I tell them about Reece and Penny. The pills. The debt. His hands on her. The grooming—the slow, patient escalation from dealer to owner, the same playbook he used on Daisy.
By the time I finish, I’m not speaking anymore. I’m making sounds. The particular sounds of a person who has emptied himself of every secret and is left with nothing but the grief of what the secrets cost.
Alice pulls me into her arms. I collapse against her—six-two, bloody knuckles, cage fighter, the boy who beat Garrett Pennington unconscious at thirteen—and I cry into Alice MacHale’s shoulder the way I cried into my own mother’s shoulder when I was small enough that her body could contain my pain.
Nobody speaks. The waiting room absorbs the grief the way waiting rooms are designed to—quietly, without judgment, a container built for the worst moments of people’s lives.
Gideon stands. Walks to me. Puts his hand on my head—heavy, deliberate, the weight of a father who is choosing to extend grace to a boy who has given him every reason not to.
“You’re staying with us.” Not a question. Not an offer. A fact. “Your room is the guest room. It’s yours for as long as you need it. This is not a discussion.”
“G, I don’t—after what I did to Penny—”
“You saved our daughter tonight. You found her. You held her. You called the ambulance. And before that—at thirteen, Xander—you saved her from something we didn’t even know was happening.
” His voice is thick. His eyes wet. “You have done terrible things and you have done heroic things and both of those are true at the same time, and I am choosing to hold both, because that’s what family does.
You are our family. You have always been our family. End of discussion.”
Alice nods against my hair. “End of discussion, sweetheart.”
The doctor comes out forty minutes later. Scrubs. Tired eyes. The expression of a medical professional who has just fought a body back from the edge and is cautiously optimistic.
“She’s stable. The Narcan reversed the opioid effects. We’ve got her on IV fluids and monitoring. She’s not fully conscious yet, but her vitals are improving.” He looks at Alice and Gideon. “You’ve got a fighter. Another thirty minutes and we might be having a very different conversation.”
Alice crumbles. Gideon catches her. The relief is not joyful—it’s the particular relief of a sentence commuted, not a freedom granted. She’s alive. She’s stable. What comes next is the harder part.
“We’d like to keep her for forty-eight hours minimum. I’ll have our substance abuse team consult in the morning. She’ll need a treatment plan before discharge.”
Gideon nods. Professional. The crisis communicator managing the briefing. “Whatever she needs.”
Alice goes back in. She won’t leave Penny’s side—the ferocity of a mother who almost lost her child and is not going to let go until the universe proves it can be trusted again, which may be never.
Gideon turns to me. “Let’s go home. You need sleep. I need… I need to not be in this building.”
We drive back. The car is quiet again—but the quiet has changed. It’s not the quiet of things unsaid. It’s the quiet of things that have been said and are now settling, like snow on a field, covering the ground but not erasing what’s underneath.
We pull into the MacHale driveway. The porch light is on. It’s always on.
Gideon turns to me. “Your room, second door on the right. Towels are in the closet. If you need anything—anything, Xander—you come find me.”
I nod. We go inside. He goes to his room. I go to mine. The guest room that has been my room a hundred times before—the bed I slept in when Lucian was loud, the window that looks out on the treehouse, the warm safety of a house that runs on love instead of fear.
I lie on the bed. Stare at the ceiling. And for the first time since October, I don’t reach for the pills. Not because I don’t want them. Because the wanting has been displaced by something larger—the image of Penny on the treehouse floor, the white of her skin, the absence in her eyes.
I almost lost her. Not metaphorically. Not in the way I’ve been losing her all semester—through cruelty and distance and the slow erosion of trust. Actually lost her. Dead. Gone. A body on a floor in the place where we were happy.
Never again. I will never be the reason she reaches for those pills again. The vow sits in my chest like a coal. Burning. Alive.
School the next day is a warzone.
The whispers are louder now—Penny’s overdose has traveled through the Edgewood grapevine with the particular speed of tragedy in a community that runs on gossip.
The details are wrong—as they always are—but the broad strokes have landed: Penny MacHale overdosed.
Penny MacHale is in the hospital. Penny MacHale’s perfect life turned out to be not so perfect.
I don’t make it to first period.
I’m at my locker when my phone buzzes.
Reece: Heard your girl had a rough night. Shame. She still owes me though. Make sure she knows.
I stare at the text. Read it again. Read it a third time. The red comes—not the hot kind, not the explosive kind. The cold kind. The kind that is not anger but decision. The kind that says: this ends today.
Danny appears beside me. He’s seen the text—I don’t know how, maybe I showed him, maybe he leaned over, it doesn’t matter. His face goes from the controlled grief he’s been wearing since last night to something volcanic.
“That motherfucker.” Danny’s voice is low. Shaking. The quiet one roaring. “Penny is in a hospital bed and he’s texting about her tab? My sister is in another state trying to get clean because of him and he’s texting about tabs?”
“Danny—”
“No! I’m done being calm about this. He almost killed Penny. He destroyed Daisy. He’s had both of them under his thumb for months and we’ve been sitting here having conversations about plans while he’s out there ruining lives!”
He’s yelling now. In the hallway. Kids are stopping. Phones are coming out. Danny Rorke does not yell. Danny Rorke observes, processes, delivers quiet devastation. The fact that he’s screaming in a school hallway is the equivalent of a seismograph spiking.
Kaiden arrives. Iz behind him. Ryan flanking. The formation—the Elite Five minus Penny, assembling around a crisis the way we’ve assembled our whole lives.
“Not here,” Kaiden says. The leader voice. “Not in this hallway. We handle this, but not like this. After school. My house. The dads are waiting.”
“The dads?” Danny’s eyebrows rise.
“Callum and Thomas. This is bigger than us, Danny. We’re eighteen. Reece is not. This needs adults.”
Danny’s jaw works. The frustration of a boy who wants to handle this with his fists and is being told to use a system he doesn’t trust. But he nods. Because Kaiden asked. And when Kaiden asks, we listen—not because he’s the leader, but because he’s usually right.
The Monaghan kitchen. Three p.m. The geography of a room where wars are planned.
Callum at the head of the table. Thomas beside him—still in his reading glasses, a notepad in front of him because Thomas O’Farrell takes notes the way other men breathe.
The five of us arranged around them. The energy of a room where adults and teenagers are sharing a table as equals for the first time.
“Alright,” Callum says. “Full briefing. Everything you know about Reece Hall. Start from the beginning.”
I talk. More than I’ve talked in months.
The underground fights—locations, frequency, the money trail.
Reece’s operation—who he sells to, where he sources, the network of Edgewood kids who are in his web.
Daisy. Penny. Me. The debts. The leverage.
The particular way Reece controls people—not through force, through dependency.
Danny adds the Daisy pieces. His voice is tight, controlled, the barely controlled effort of a boy talking about his sister’s destruction while sitting in a room full of people who could have prevented it if he’d known sooner.
He doesn’t look at me while he talks. The not-looking is louder than shouting.
Ryan has information nobody else does—because Ryan always has information nobody else does. Financial connections. Phone records he obtained through methods he declines to specify. The outline of Reece’s operation rendered in data.