23. Penelope
Iwake up on the couch.
My head is on Xander’s chest. His arm is around me.
The blanket my mom draped over us sometime during the night is twisted between our legs.
The TV is on—muted, a cooking show, the chef silently chopping something that requires more energy than either of us has.
Morning light is coming through the windows in pale stripes.
The house smells like the coffee my dad programmed to brew at six a.m. because Gideon MacHale believes in routines even when the world is burning.
I don’t move. Xander’s heartbeat is under my ear—steady, slow, the rhythm of a boy who is actually sleeping for once. I count the beats. Twelve. Thirteen. The counting is grounding. Darla taught me that—when the thoughts spiral, anchor to something real. Something measurable. A heartbeat counts.
The friendship bracelet on his wrist is pressed against my shoulder. Teal and yellow against his bruised skin. The bracelet that was cut off by police and returned by a lawyer and tied on by a boy named Iz and survived a cage fight and pepper spray and a warehouse. Still holding. Like us.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I reach for it without lifting my head.
Ryan.
I answer. Whisper, because Xander is still sleeping and sleep is the one thing I can give him right now that doesn’t require me to be brave.
“Ry?”
Silence. Then breathing. The kind of breathing that comes before words that change everything.
“Daisy didn’t make it.”
Four words. The world tilting. The couch tilting. The heartbeat under my ear staying steady because Xander doesn’t know yet. He’s sleeping through the moment his friend’s sister dies, and I am the one holding the phone and the information and the weight of what comes next.
“Ry—”
“Surgery complications. Cliff called an hour ago. She went into cardiac arrest on the table. They tried for forty minutes.” His voice is flat.
Emptied. The voice of a boy who has been sitting beside his best friend all night and is delivering this news with the last reserves of energy he has. “Danny is… Danny is not okay, Penny.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s been screaming for two hours and now he’s stopped and the stopping is worse than the screaming.
It means he punched a hole in his bedroom wall and cut his hand and won’t let me clean it.
It means he’s blaming everybody. Cat. You.
X. Reece. Everybody except Daisy because blaming Daisy means admitting his sister chose Reece over her family and he can’t carry that yet. ”
The tears come. Quiet. Running sideways off my cheek onto Xander’s shirt. He stirs. His arm tightening around me—the instinct of a sleeping body that feels the person it’s holding begin to shake.
“Penny?” His voice, thick with sleep. “What’s wrong?”
I look up at him. His face—bruised, swollen, the aftermath of the cage and the parking lot and the pepper spray and the warehouse. His eyes finding mine. Reading my face. The way he’s been reading my face since we were old enough to have expressions.
“Daisy died.”
His body goes rigid. Every muscle. The arm around me tightening past comfort into compression—the involuntary grip of a boy whose nervous system has just received information it doesn’t know how to process.
“When?”
“An hour ago. Surgery complications. Ryan’s with Danny.”
He sits up. Runs his hands through his hair. Pulls. The gesture of a boy trying to physically rearrange his own brain. His eyes are wet but the tears aren’t falling—they’re pooling, held, the crying of a person who has been trained by a lifetime of Lucian Anderson to keep the water behind the dam.
“Fuck.” Whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I put the phone on speaker. “Ry, you’re on speaker. X is here.”
Ryan: “X. Danny is blaming you. And Penny. And Cat. I need you to know that so you’re prepared. He’s not thinking straight—grief is doing the talking. But the words are coming and they’re going to hurt.”
Xander’s jaw sets. “Is he safe?”
“He’s not going to hurt himself, if that’s what you’re asking. But he’s in a dark place. The darkest I’ve ever seen him.”
“Stay with him. Don’t leave. Even if he tells you to.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
We hang up. The house is quiet. The coffee machine finishes its cycle. The cooking show continues its silent chopping.
My mom appears on the stairs. She takes one look at our faces and knows. Mothers always know. She crosses the room and sits beside us and doesn’t ask what happened. She just opens her arms.
By noon, the MacHale kitchen is a command center again.
Arthur Walsh in his suit—because Arthur Walsh is always in a suit. Iz beside him, quiet, his face carrying the weight of everything: Daisy’s death, Danny’s blame, my trauma, Xander’s bruises. The boy who holds the emotional center of the group absorbing the impact at every contact point.
Darla arrives with a bag—files, medication adjustments, the tools of a doctor who has been called to a crisis and has brought the entire toolbox.
She sets up at the table with the efficiency of a woman who has done this before and will do it again and treats each time with the same urgency as the first.
Arthur speaks first. The lawyer’s briefing. Clear. Ordered. The facts stripped of emotion because the courtroom doesn’t accept feelings as evidence.
“Reece Hall is in federal custody. The charges include drug distribution, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, assault with a deadly weapon, and conspiracy. Between Xander’s body cam footage, Daisy’s earlier testimony, the evidence from the arrested associate, and the testimony Cat and Penny will provide, the case is airtight. He’s not getting out.”
My dad: “And Lucian?”
“Lucian Anderson is facing federal charges for money laundering, tax fraud, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, and accessory to kidnapping. The house—the Anderson estate—was in Adeena’s name.
Lucian never owned it. I found the original will.
The house, the accounts Adeena had in her name, everything she left—it belongs to Xander. ”
Xander shifts. Beside me. His hand gripping mine under the table.
He doesn’t speak. The information about the house—his mother’s house, the house where she hung herself, the house where Lucian beat him and Veronica replaced her and Valentina filmed everything—landing on him with a weight I can feel through his fingers.
“I don’t want to talk about that right now,” he says. Quiet. Not refusing—deferring. The emotional budget of a boy who has enough to process and cannot add an inheritance to the list.
Arthur nods. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no rush.”
“Veronica and Valentina?” my dad asks.
“Arrested. Their charges are lesser—accessory, conspiracy, filing false police reports. Valentina’s phone had the edited video used to frame Penny. They’ll do time, but less than Lucian. Less than Reece.”
Darla takes over. Shifting from legal to clinical. The transition seamless—the woman is both doctor and mother and treats the intersection as a professional space.
“All of you are going to need intensive support. Not just Penny and Xander—all of the kids. Cat went through another hostage situation. Kaiden watched his girlfriend get hurt again. Danny just lost his sister. Ryan is holding Danny together while processing his own situation with Ally. Iz is carrying everybody’s weight.
” She looks at us. “I’m adjusting the treatment plans for all of you.
More sessions. Trauma-specific protocols.
And I’m bringing in additional therapists because this exceeds what Gina and I can handle alone. ”
My mom: “What about the parents? We’re—I feel like I’m falling apart, Darla.”
“You are. And that’s normal. Alice, you and Gideon have been through a kidnapping, an overdose, an arrest, and now this—all in the span of a few months. Your nervous systems are fried. I’m extending the family therapy component and I want both of you in individual sessions too. Not optional.”
My dad nods. The man who runs crisis communication for a living accepting that he needs help managing his own crisis. The humility of that—Gideon MacHale admitting he can’t handle this alone—is one of the bravest things I’ve seen him do.
Iz speaks for the first time. “Danny is blaming Cat and Penny for Daisy’s death.”
The room absorbs it.
“He’s not wrong to feel that way,” Darla says.
Every head turns to her. “Grief needs a target. Danny’s target right now is the people in the room when the gun went off.
That’s normal. That’s expected. And it’s temporary—if we handle it correctly.
Danny needs space to grieve without judgment and therapy to process the anger before it calcifies into something permanent. ”
“And if it does? Calcify?” Iz asks. The question of a boy who is watching a friend group fracture and is terrified the fracture is permanent.
“Then we work harder. I don’t give up on anyone, Issac. You know that.”
The meeting continues. Details. Timelines. Prescriptions. The machinery of recovery engaging around us like a system booting up—slow at first, then steadier, the programs loading, the diagnostics running.
Arthur packs his briefcase. Darla her bag. Iz stands.
He walks to me. Takes my hand. Squeezes. Doesn’t speak. Then walks to Xander. Puts his hand on X’s shoulder. Squeezes. The same pressure. The same duration. The boy who loves us both giving us the same gift at the same time: the knowledge that he’s there. Regardless of which of us he’s there for.
They leave. The house empties again. The tide going out.
Just us. The MacHale family. The quiet that follows the departure of professionals and friends and the adults who hold the scaffolding up. The quiet that is not peace but the space where peace might grow if you water it enough.