2. Chapter 2 Alex
A few hours to Brackett Lake. I'd driven it enough times to know every mile of it, which meant my hands could do the driving while the rest of me rehearsed.
Eldridge's voice had been living in my ear for days.
The athletic endowment. The boathouse renovation fund. The scholarship pool. The named chairs. Everything, Alex. Going back forty years.
A formal review on the January board agenda. Nothing pulled yet. Just the machinery, warming up where everyone could hear it. My father didn't threaten people. He scheduled things.
And he didn't know I knew.
I ran the dinner the whole way north: anticipate the questions, plan the silences, decide in advance where to put your hands. He would present the review whenever he was ready, and he would watch my face for the shatter.
There would be no shattering. I'd had plenty of time to do my shattering in private.
The road climbed. Farms, then forest, then the long ridge where the trees break on the right side, and there it was — Brackett Lake, white and enormous below.
I pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park just to look at it. Snapped a photo and sent it to Liam.
Liam
Took you long enough.
Alex
I'm here now.
Liam
Wait till you hear it crack at night. Sounds like the whole lake talking in its sleep.
Alex
That's pretty poetic for you.
Liam
Shut up.
Alex
Hah. Twenty minutes out. Wish me luck.
Liam
Go get em.
I sat there a few seconds longer than the schedule allowed, then pulled back onto the road.
Thirty seconds of being Liam's boyfriend. Then down the hill to go be a Harrington.
The gates at Peninsula Point stood open, which meant I was expected.
The driveway was plowed to the asphalt. Wreaths hung on the gateposts — matched, wired, professionally lit. A Christmas you order from a company with a waitlist. Somebody's hands had made them. Nobody's hands in this family.
Then the trees opened, and the house appeared.
Stone and glass at the crown of the point, jutting over the water like it was daring the lake to object. My great-grandfather built the original, and my father rebuilt it into this. A structure designed to be seen from every dock on four miles of shoreline.
We didn't do Christmas here. Christmas was usually in Greenwich at the colonial on Round Hill Road, the club on the twenty-third, the same forty people. The lake was June through August. A summer place, winterized and dark by September every year of my life.
But he'd summoned me here. Opened the house in December, staffed it, plowed it, lit it. My father didn't do anything without a reason, which meant the venue was a message.
I parked. Breathed. Checked my face in the visor mirror out of two decades of habit — composure, verified — and got out into the cold that cut right through my peacoat.
The front door opened before I reached it.
"Alex." My mother.
Catherine Harrington wore winter white and pearl earrings to stand in her own doorway on a Saturday, and she put her arms around me.
Here is the thing about my mother: the hug was real.
It was always real. Warmth was never the missing ingredient.
But no matter what she thought or felt, my father made all decisions.
"Come in before you let the heat out," she said, pulling back to look at me. "How's the semester been? How were finals?"
"Good. I think I pulled a 3.9."
"You think or you know?"
"I know. I just don't like saying it out loud."
She smiled. The real one, not the hostess one. Then it softened into something else.
"I heard about what happened," she said.
"About what?"
"The incident. With Marcus."
I felt my stomach tighten. Of course she knew. Thomas would have told her his version — the version where his son threw punches in a library like an animal, the version stripped of context.
"Yeah," I said. "I shouldn't have done that."
She looked at me. Held there a second. Then, quietly:
"I'm glad you stood up for yourself, Alex."
My chest did something I wasn't ready for. A crack, small and hot, in the place where I kept the things my mother said that might mean more than she was allowed to let on.
"Thanks, Mom."
She held my eyes a beat longer than she needed to. Then she straightened up and was Catherine Harrington again.
"Your room's ready. I had Margaret put fresh towels up." She touched my arm as I turned toward the stairs, brief, almost nothing. "Your father's in a mood. Not a bad mood. A focused mood. You know the difference."
I did know the difference. A bad mood meant short sentences and an early night. A focused mood meant a plan.
"I'll be fine, Mom."
"I know you will." She said it quickly. "He'll be off by dinner, seven."
"Sharp," I said, raising my eyebrows.
My mother smirked, and I headed up the stone stairs.
My room was on the second floor, lakeside, and walking into it was like walking into the past.
Nothing had moved. The trophies stood on their shelf in height order — junior states, the club four, the school eight — polished, spaced, aligned.
Somebody dusted them on a schedule. The Kingswell pennant hung over the desk.
The framed photographs in their grid: a boy in a navy blazer at a podium, a boy shaking hands with a senator, a boy in a boat with a medal, smiling the trained smile in every single frame.
I stood in the middle of it with my bag on my shoulder and understood that I was part of the display in this museum.
Alexander Harrington: The Early Years. Every object chosen, every angle approved.
I'd placed seventh in a junior single at fourteen and third at Canadian Juniors at sixteen, and those trophies existed somewhere in a box. Only the wins made the shelf.
The boy in these photographs had never lost anything. That's how you knew he wasn't real.
I unpacked the way I'd been taught. Shirts on hangers, kit in the bottom drawer. Liam's hoodie came out last. Burgundy, Riverside Crew across the front in cracked white letters, washed soft.
I hid it under my pillow and got ready to go down for dinner.
***
My father came to the table at 6:58, sat at 6:59, and at seven exactly the housekeeper brought the first course.
"Alexander." He shook my hand. He'd shaken my hand since I was eleven. "Good drive?"
"Fine. Clear roads."
"Good."
He looked well. Rested, tanned from somewhere, silver hair cut that week. He poured the wine himself — a Barolo, decanted.
We performed the meal. Conversation as agenda. He opened with the market, moved to a colleague's son at Goldman, touched my grades — I gave him the 3.9 and he nodded like a line item clearing. My mother contributed warmth at the intervals warmth was scheduled.
Then, over the lamb: "The Charles." He held his glass by the stem and looked at me over it. "Fourth."
"Fourth," I said.
"In a double. With the Riverside boy." The phrase sat on the tablecloth between us. "A program record, I'm told."
"Both programs."
"Mm." He drank. "Top five is significant. Fourth is not third."
"No," I agreed. "It's fourth."
He set the glass down. "We should discuss the spring while you're here. Next semester's arrangements."
"Arrangements?" I asked, playing ignorant.
"Your enrollment. Your program." A small motion of his hand, sweeping crumbs off the cloth. "There's paperwork that ought to be settled by the New Year. Deadlines are deadlines." He looked at me directly. "We'll sit down properly this week and go through it all then."
Paperwork. Deadlines. This week. But Eldridge's voice was still in my ear. The athletic endowment. The boathouse renovation fund. The scholarship pool. Everything.
Was the paperwork all of it? Or was this the top layer, and the review was underneath it, waiting for the moment I said no?
I couldn't tell. My father had spent thirty years in rooms where the thing on the table was never the thing on the table, and I'd been trained inside the same rooms, and I still couldn't tell whether I was looking at paperwork or at the lid of something I hadn't been shown yet.
I put more lamb on my fork.
"This week then," I said.
He studied me for two full seconds. Whatever he was checking for, my face declined to provide it, and I watched him file the composure in the wrong drawer. The one marked compliance. His shoulders settled a quarter inch.
I looked at my mother once, near the end. She was rearranging the last bite she wasn't going to eat. She felt the look.
"Your father knows best, Alexander," she said. The words had the smoothness of a stone kept in a pocket for thirty years.
Dinner carried on with little visible drama, but it was all there swimming underneath us. I couldn't wait to get back upstairs and text Liam and feel like myself again. Wearing the mask was getting tiring, especially after I'd spent so much time working on being my true self.
I finished my last bite and folded my napkin. "I'm tired from the drive," I said.
"I'm sure you are, honey," my mom said after taking a sip of her wine.
"Goodnight, Alex," my father said.
I pushed out my chair and left the table; relief hit me the moment I was out of their sight and on my way up the stairs.
***
I went upstairs and closed the bedroom door and stood there for a second in the quiet. Then I started taking off everything that reminded me of the person I didn't want to be anymore.
The button-up first. I hung it on the hanger and put it back in the closet.
Then the slacks. Folded them over the chair the way I'd been taught.
Belt coiled on the desk. The whole uniform, piece by piece, until I was standing in my boxers.
I pulled on sweatpants. Then I reached under the pillow and grabbed the Liam's Riverside hoodie.
It was soft in a way that expensive things never get, because expensive things get replaced before they have the chance.
I pulled it over my head, and the smell hit me. Laundry detergent that wasn't mine, deodorant that wasn't mine, and underneath both… Liam. The smell of the person I'd been pressed against in a twin bed for weeks.
This was the part of the day that was mine. Not the foyer, not the dining room, not the study with its shut door. This was where I got to stop being Alexander and just be Alex.
The window faced south, over the water.
I'd stood at it two summers ago, on the night my father had assigned me to the marina, and I'd looked out at the dark lake and thought about a boy whose last name I didn't know yet. The moonlight on the water. One light near the marina. The heat low in my stomach and the fear right behind it.
Is he thinking about it too?
Almost two years. Now the lake was frozen white to the far shore, the marina dark for the season, and the south side lay along the ice like a thin string of lights. Small houses, low and warm.
The phone buzzed in my hand.
Liam
Status report. Did you survive dinner?
Alex
Survived. Light psychological warfare. He wants to go through everything this week.
Liam
Okay. You going to be okay?
Alex
I'm in your hoodie and sweatpants looking out the window at your side of the lake. I feel like myself.
Liam
<3
Liam
Keep it.
Alex
It smells like you.
Liam
You can't say stuff like that when I'm lying here alone.
Alex
I mean it. This house is a lot. Your hoodie is the only real thing in it.
Liam
Then don't take it off.
Alex
I won't.
Liam
It's been a week since I've gotten to take that hoodie off you.
Alex
I miss you too.
Liam
A WEEK. So when are we making time? How does this even work up here?
Alex
I don't know yet. My dad's got all of this mapped out and I'm a nervous.
Liam
Sometime this week?
Alex
Maybe.
Liam
When?
Alex
Liam, I can't give you a day right now. I just walked into this house an hour ago.
Liam
I know. I'm just asking when I get to see you.
Alex
And I'm telling you, I don't know yet. Can you give me a day to figure out what I'm walking into here before I start planning escapes?
The three dots appeared. Stopped. Appeared again. Stopped.
Liam
Yeah. Sorry. Take your time.
I read the text and knew exactly what had happened. The shutting-down thing. The sound of Liam pulling back.
I'd heard it in his voice on the bridge.
I'd felt it on the phone when he went monosyllabic.
And now I was reading it, and I couldn't fix it from this house, and reaching through the phone to shake him and say it's not about you, it's never about you wouldn't work because the fear he carried wasn't about logic.
Alex
Hey. I'm not pulling away. I'm just in the middle of something here and I can't plan yet. That's all it is.
Liam
I know. It's fine.
Fine. The word that never meant fine.
Alex
We'll figure it out.
Liam
Okay.
Alex
Okay?
Liam
I'm good… really. Night, Alex.
Alex
Goodnight.
I set the phone on the sill and stood at the glass.
Part of me was frustrated. Not at Liam, but the gap between what he needed from me and what I could give him from inside this house. He wanted a day, a plan, a when. I wanted to give him one. I just didn't have one yet, and the pushing made it feel like the not-having was me being a bad boyfriend.
And then the pulling away. I knew what lived underneath it. I'd heard the entire story on the bridge. I knew why Liam went quiet when he was scared. I just wished he didn't get scared of me.
Because I was about to walk into a room this week and blow up my entire life, and the one thing I needed to know was that he'd be there on the other side of it.
He'd be there. I knew that. Liam would be there. He always was.
I got into a bed that had never felt like mine, wearing stolen Riverside property, and lay there a long time before I slept.