9. Penelope #3
“We didn’t go wrong,” my dad says. “We raised a beautiful, smart, talented girl who was kidnapped and traumatized and found the one thing that made the pain stop. We didn’t cause that. But we can be part of the way out.”
I clear my throat. They spin. The guilt of parents caught discussing their child—not because they shouldn’t be, but because the raw honesty of their conversation wasn’t meant for my ears.
“Do you trust me?” I ask. Looking at my mom. “Don’t lie. I need real right now, Mom. I can’t survive any more performance.”
She looks at my dad. He nods—the smallest nod, the one that says “tell her the truth even though it’s hard.”
“Yes and no.”
The honesty stings. But it’s a clean sting. Not the dirty kind that comes from lies.
“So, no.”
“It’s not that simple.” She crosses the room.
Takes my hands. “I trust you, Penny. I trust my daughter—the girl who loves music and makes playlists for feelings that don’t have names and stayed up until three a.m. teaching herself music management because she wanted to earn her own car.
I trust that girl with my whole heart.” She pauses.
“What I don’t trust are the voices. The ones in your head that tell you the pills are the answer.
I know those voices, baby. I’ve heard them myself.
And they’re very, very convincing. So I trust you and I don’t trust them, and the work we’re about to do is learning to tell the difference. ”
I pull her into a hug. Tight. The kind where you can’t tell who’s holding whom.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you more than you could possibly understand.”
My dad wraps around both of us. The three-person knot. The MacHale formation.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
The drive home is quiet. The good quiet—the kind that doesn’t need filling because the people inside it have said enough and are resting in the aftermath.
We pull into the driveway. The porch light is on. Always on.
And in front of the garage: Xander’s car.
My heart rate spikes. The monitor isn’t on my finger anymore but I can feel the acceleration in my chest—the cardiac response of a girl who is about to share a roof with the boy who broke her and saved her and broke her again and saved her again, on a loop, a carousel of damage and rescue that she cannot get off.
My mom turns to me. “He’s been here since the night he found you. Your father set him up in the guest room. He’s been… quiet. Helping around the house. Eating meals with us. Being… Xander.” She pauses. “The Xander we remember.”
I nod. Get out. Walk to the front door. The steps feel heavier than they should—not from weakness but from the gravity of what’s on the other side.
Inside. The kitchen. Warm. The smell of something baking—bread, probably. Gideon’s stress response.
Xander is at the counter. Glass of water in his hand.
He’s in sweats and a t-shirt, which means he’s been here a while, comfortable enough to wear soft clothes.
His hair is damp—just showered. His face is a map of damage: the black eye from Lucian, the bruises from my fist and the cops, the split on his jaw that’s healing into a scar.
He looks up. Our eyes meet across the kitchen island. The electricity of two people who have been tearing each other apart for months and are now standing in the same room without armor.
He sets the glass down.
I set my bag down.
We stare at each other.
My parents have the particular awareness of parents who know when to disappear. I hear them on the stairs—my mom’s soft footsteps, my dad’s heavier ones. A door closing. Space. The thing they keep giving us and we keep wasting.
Xander moves first.
He comes around the island. Toward me. Not fast—slow. Deliberate. The approach of a boy who is trying not to scare a girl he’s been scaring for months. He stops three feet away.
“Don’t.” His voice is different. Not cold. Not the Lucian voice. Something raw, peeled, the voice underneath all the voices. “Don’t ever fucking do that again, Penelope.”
“Xander—”
“I found you.” He steps closer. Two feet.
“In our treehouse. On the blanket my mother made. With pills on the floor and your eyes rolled back and your skin was so cold, Penny. So fucking cold. And I held you and you didn’t move and I didn’t know if you were alive or dead and for thirty seconds I lived in a world where you didn’t exist anymore and it was the worst thirty seconds of my life.
” His voice cracks. “Worse than the closet. Worse than Lucian. Worse than finding my mother. Because my mother was already gone when I opened that door, but you—you were still there. You were still warm enough to save. And if I had been five minutes later—”
He can’t finish.
He reaches for me. His hand finds my throat—not squeezing, not threatening. Resting. His calloused fingers against my pulse, feeling the beat, counting it. The gesture of a person who needs physical proof that the body in front of him is still running.
“You feel that?” he says. Low. His thumb on my pulse point. “That’s your heart. That’s you, alive. Don’t ever take that away from the people who need it. Don’t ever take that away from me.”
My body does the thing it always does when Xander’s hands are on me—betrays me. The warmth. The tightening. The electricity that runs from his fingertips to my bloodstream and makes everything inside me lean toward him like a plant toward light.
His hand on my throat. His mouth inches from mine. The same configuration as the closet, as the hallway, as every other moment where the line between violence and tenderness has blurred to nothing.
I look at his wrist.
Bare.
No bracelet. No teal and yellow threads. No eleven years of “forever” tied around his pulse.
The absence hits me harder than any word he’s said tonight. Harder than the pool house. Harder than “slumming it.” Because the bracelet was the last real thing—the last proof that underneath all the damage, the boy from the swings still existed. And it’s gone.
“Where’s your bracelet?”
He blinks. Looks at his wrist. The pale strip of skin where the threads lived for eleven years.
“The police took it. When I was arrested. They had to cut it off.”
The words hang between us. The police cut it off.
The thing we tied on each other at seven.
The thing that survived Lucian and Garrett and the kidnapping and the closet and every terrible thing.
The cops cut it off his wrist and sealed it in a plastic bag and it’s sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, and the symbolism is so on-the-nose it would be funny if it weren’t devastating.
His hand drops from my throat. He steps back. The mask doesn’t go on—but the distance returns. The particular distance of a boy who just showed me everything and is now scared of what I’ll do with it.
“Get some sleep, Penny.” Quiet. “Darla’s program starts tomorrow.”
He turns. Walks to the guest room. The door closes.
I stand in the kitchen. My hand on my own throat, where his hand was. My pulse still fast under my fingers. The warmth still there, his ghost, his print on my skin.
I go upstairs. Close my door. Get into bed.
The bed that smells like my shampoo and my detergent and the particular safety of a room that has been mine since childhood.
The concert ticket stubs on the corkboard.
The bluetooth speaker with the stickers.
The friendship bracelet on my wrist—still there, still faded, still teal and yellow. I have mine. He doesn’t have his.
I call Cat.
She picks up on the first ring. “Are you okay?”
“He put his hand on my throat.”
Silence. Then: “In a bad way or a…”
“Neither. Both. He was telling me how scared he was. How he found me in the treehouse. And his hand was on my pulse and he was feeling my heartbeat and telling me not to take it away from him. And my whole body—” I press my palm to my face.
“My whole body responded to him, Cat. Even after everything. Even after the closet and the pool house and the hallway. My body still… wants him. Near me. On me. And I don’t know if that’s love or trauma bonding or just the fact that I’ve been wired to him since birth and the wiring doesn’t care about what my brain thinks. ”
“Probably all three,” Cat says. “And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be one thing. It can be complicated.”
“His bracelet is gone.”
“What?”
“The friendship bracelet. The police cut it off when he was arrested. He doesn’t have it anymore.”
Cat is quiet. She understands the weight. She’s the only person besides Xander who understands what that bracelet means—not as jewelry, not as nostalgia. As evidence. As the physical proof of a bond that predates damage.
“That’s… shit, Penny. I’m sorry.”
“I keep seeing it. The closet. The hallway. His back when he walked away. The treehouse floor. It all plays on a loop and I can’t stop it.
I close my eyes and the carousel starts and the only thing that ever made it stop was the pills and I can’t take the pills and I don’t know how to exist in the noise without them. ”
“You learn.” Cat’s voice is soft. The voice she uses when she’s speaking from experience rather than theory.
“You learn to let the carousel run. You don’t fight it.
You let the images come and you watch them like a movie you’ve seen before and you remind yourself: this already happened.
It’s not happening now. You survived it then and you’re surviving it now.
It’s Darla’s whole thing—she’ll teach you. She taught me.”
“I just want him to understand.” My voice is small.
Bed-voice. The voice that only exists in the dark, under covers, on the phone with the person you trust most. “I want Xander to understand that the girl in the treehouse wasn’t trying to hurt him.
She was trying to stop hurting. And the difference matters. ”
“He understands, Penny. He told a room full of parents every secret he’s been keeping since October.
He cried in your mother’s arms. He’s sleeping in your guest room right now instead of a couch or a car or the street because your parents looked at the boy who hurt their daughter and saw a boy who needed saving too.
That’s not a boy who doesn’t understand.
That’s a boy who is finally starting to. ”
I turn on my side. Pull the blanket up. The phone on the pillow beside me, Cat’s breathing in my ear.
“Stay on?”
“Always.”
We don’t talk. Just breathe. The way we did at the Monaghans’ when she held my hand in the dark. The way we did when we were little and the world was something you could hide from under a blanket.
Somewhere downstairs, a door opens and closes—Xander, maybe, getting water or checking the locks or doing whatever boys do at midnight when they can’t sleep.
The sound of his footsteps on the stairs—bare feet on hardwood, quiet, the particular stealth of a person who has spent his life not waking people because waking people in his old house meant drawing Lucian’s attention.
I press the friendship bracelet to my lips. Teal and yellow. The ocean and the sun.
I’m trying, Cat. I don’t know if trying is enough. But I’m trying.
I fall asleep with Cat’s breathing in my ear and Xander’s footsteps in the hall and the bracelet against my mouth and the craving humming under my skin like a frequency I’m learning—slowly, painfully, one night at a time—to live with instead of surrender to.
Day one of the rest of my life.
The hardest day is always day one.