14. Xander
I’m sitting in my car in the MacHale driveway when Iz’s car pulls in beside me.
They don't see me. The tint on my windows is dark enough that I’m invisible from the outside, which means I have a front-row seat to what happens next.
Iz gets out of the driver's side. Walks around the car. Opens Penny’s door for her—the particular chivalry of a boy raised by Darla Walsh. Penny takes his hand. Steps out. He pulls her close and she laughs—the real one, the belly laugh, the one I used to earn and now only hear from across rooms.
They stand in the driveway. Iz’s hands on her waist. Her hands on his chest. He leans down and kisses her—soft, slow, the kind of kiss that isn’t trying to prove anything. Just two people who enjoy each other’s mouths and aren’t in a hurry.
I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles go white.
They walk to the front door. His arm around her shoulders.
The door opens. Alice. Her face lights up—the brightness of a mother seeing her daughter happy.
Iz steps inside and Alice pulls him into a hug.
Not a polite hug—a real one. The hug of a woman who has decided this boy is welcome in her home and her heart.
Gideon appears. Extends his hand. Iz takes it—firm, eye contact, the handshake of a young man who was taught to look a father in the eye and not let go first. Gideon nods. The approval nod. The “this is the kind of boy I want near my daughter” nod.
They all go inside. Through the kitchen window I watch Iz lean against the island, talking to Gideon, gesturing big, animated, making him laugh.
Alice smiles. Penny bumps Iz with her shoulder and he catches her hand and pulls her back to kiss her head and the whole kitchen is warm and bright and full of the particular energy a good person brings to a good family.
He’s the boy every parent wants their daughter to bring home. Kind. Present. Holds doors. Makes eye contact. Doesn’t flinch when someone hugs him because he wasn’t raised in a house where touch meant danger.
I wait. Watch. The kitchen scene continues—snacks, conversation, the domestic choreography of a family absorbing a guest. Then Penny takes Iz’s hand. Points toward the stairs. They head up.
Together. To her room.
Her bedroom door closes. I can see the light through her window from where I’m sitting in the driveway. Two silhouettes. Close. The proximity of two people who have closed a door and are alone.
I sit in the dark and watch the light in her window and feel the animal in my chest thrashing against its cage with a violence that no program or pill or meditation technique can contain.
The green beast doesn’t roar. It screams. The scream of a creature watching another animal enter the territory it considers sacred and being unable to do a single thing about it because the territory was surrendered, voluntarily, through months of cruelty and cowardice.
That should be me in that room. My hand she’s holding.
My voice making her laugh. My body she’s choosing to be alone with behind a closed door.
That should be me and it’s not because I traded it—traded her—for pills and pride and the particular self-destruction that Lucian Anderson gifted me alongside his jawline and his temper.
I can’t sit here. If I sit here any longer I’m going to kick down the front door and drag Iz out of that room by his collar and ruin every relationship I have left.
I get out. Go inside. The kitchen is quiet now—Alice is in her studio above the garage, painting. The sound of music drifting down, faint, the particular hum of a woman in her element.
Gideon is at the table. He looks up. Reads my face. The assessment of a man who has been watching this boy’s emotional weather for eighteen years and can identify the system approaching.
“Got a project downstairs. Could use an extra set of hands.”
He doesn’t mention Penny. Doesn’t mention Iz. Doesn’t mention the bedroom door. He just offers the basement. The grace of a father who sees a boy in pain and knows that the best medicine is a task and a conversation and the particular quiet of a room where nobody is watching.
I follow him down.
The MacHale basement is enormous—the full footprint of a house that was built when Edgewood money meant space, real space, not the compressed luxury of newer construction.
One side is the standard suburban basement—storage, the furnace, the water heater, the mechanical guts of a house this size.
But the other side has been evolving. Gideon’s been working on it for months—sectioned off with new drywall, framed openings for windows that aren’t installed yet, a glass door propped against the wall waiting for its frame.
The bones of something being built with care.
“What is all this?”
“New studio for Alice.” Gideon runs his hand along the window frames.
“The one above the garage has been fine for twenty years, but the light is wrong. It faces west—good for afternoon, but she loses the morning. This one will have floor-to-ceiling glass on the south wall. Natural light all day. A door opening to the backyard for spring and summer. She deserves a space that matches what she creates.”
The love in the sentence. Not performative. Structural. The love of a man who expresses devotion through construction.
He hands me a box. “Paint supplies. Sort by color—bins are labeled.”
I sit on the floor. Start sorting. Hands occupied. Brain free. The therapy of manual labor.
We work in silence for a while. Gideon mounting shelves. The drill whirring. Screws finding studs. The comfortable rhythm of two men who don’t need conversation to share space.
But the silence fills with the thing I’m carrying. The weight of it presses down until it pushes words out of me the way pressure pushes water through cracks.
We work in silence for a while. Drill. Shelves. Sorting. The rhythm settles into something steady—hands busy, brain quieting just enough that I don’t feel like I’m going to punch through drywall.
Gideon glances over at me. Not obvious. Just…taking inventory. “You thinking about anything past next week?” he asks.
I huff a quiet laugh. “That’s ambitious.”
“I’m serious.” He sets the drill down, wipes his hands on a rag. “You’re eighteen. What do you want your life to look like a year from now?”
A year. I stare at the paint cans in front of me.
“I don’t know,” I say at first. Automatic. Default answer.
He doesn’t let it land. “You do,” he says. “You just don’t like the answer yet.”
I roll my jaw. Think about it. Really think about it. And the truth comes up fast. Easy. Like it’s been sitting there waiting.
“I want to fight,” I say.
He doesn’t react. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t shut it down.
“What kind of fighting?” he asks.
“Real fighting.” I look up at him now. “Not backyard shit. Not getting into it at school. I mean—MMA. Amateur, at least. Maybe more.”
The words feel…right. Like they fit in my mouth.
“I’m good at it,” I add. “It’s the only thing I’m good at that doesn’t feel fake.”
Gideon nods slowly. “I’ve seen you hit,” he says. “You’ve got power. Control when you want it.”
When you want it. I feel that one.
“I need something,” I say, quieter now. “Something that burns it out. Because if I don’t—”
I don’t finish the sentence. I don’t have to. He’s already there.
“You’re going to put that energy somewhere destructive,” he finishes.
“Yeah.”
“I know a guy,” Gideon says.
I look up. “What?”
“MMA gym. Not some strip mall nonsense. Real coaches. Real discipline. They train fighters who actually go somewhere.” He watches my reaction carefully. “I could make a call.”
My chest tightens. Not panic this time. Something else.
“You’re serious?”
“I don’t joke about things that matter,” he says.
I sit up straighter without realizing it.
“I want that,” I say immediately. “I want it bad.”
“I figured.” A small smile. “But there’s a condition.”
Of course there is.
I nod. “Yeah. Okay.”
“You don’t walk into a gym like that high. You don’t train hungover. You don’t show up inconsistent.” His voice is calm, but there’s steel under it now. “You stay sober. You stay disciplined. Or I don’t make the call.”
Sobriety. The word lands heavy. Real. Not abstract. Not “someday.” Now.
I swallow.
“Okay,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow. “Okay what?”
“Okay, I stay sober.”
“You commit to staying sober,” he corrects. “Not for a week. Not until it’s inconvenient. If you want this—really want this—you don’t get to half-ass it.”
My jaw tightens. Because he’s right. Because this is the first thing that’s ever been put in front of me that feels like—A path.
“I’ll do it,” I say.
And this time? I mean it. He studies me for a second. Measuring. Then he nods.
“Alright.” He picks the drill back up. “I’ll make the call tomorrow.”
Something shifts in my chest. Like a door opening I didn’t know was there.
“G—” I start, then stop.
Because now that there’s something real on the table—Now the other thing comes up. The bigger thing. The harder thing.
“I need to ask you something,” I say instead. “And it’s going to be… uncomfortable.”
He sets the drill down again. Gives me his full attention.
“I don’t know how to be a good man.”
The sentence falls out of me like something heavy I’ve been carrying up a hill. It lands on the basement floor between us and neither of us picks it up. We just look at it.
“I don’t know how to be a good partner. I don’t know how to hold someone without hurting them.
I don’t know how to be in a room with someone I love without either destroying them or running from them.
Nobody taught me, G. Lucian taught me how to fight and how to make my face a mask and how to make people afraid of me.
He didn’t teach me how to sit at a kitchen table and make a girl’s father laugh.
He didn’t teach me how to shake a hand without squeezing too hard.
He didn’t teach me how to love without leaving bruises. ”