Page 13 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
And yet…she can’t shake the feeling that there’s more going on with their new neighbors. She felt it in the things that weren’t said, all the details that were lost in the gaps between their words. No one commented on Libby’s fake brightness, the sadness behind her smile when she cracked jokes about being the only single one at the party. No one seemed to notice that Audrey and Seth barely interacted the entire time but that Audrey kept watching him across the yard as he chatted with the other men, or the number of times Seth topped off his drink. They’d all talked to one another for hours, but Hannah left feeling like they hadn’t said very much at all, at least not about anything that truly mattered.
And then her thoughts move to her own marriage. To the thingsshehasn’t said. It’s been nagging at her ever since that note arrived in their mailbox last month. Hannah can still see the red letters, boldface and defiant, as if the word has been painted into her memory:LIAR. She hates that she’s been keeping this from Mark. She doesn’t want to have the kind of marriage where secrets grow between them like weeds, where they can spread and take root, killing every good thing. And yet she can’t tell her husband the truth—not all of it, anyway.
This time, Hannah knows exactly what her mother would say. She remembers the first time she’d said it, her hand gently rocking Hannah’s shoulder, rousing her from sleep: “It’s time to go.” Hannah can still feel the stiff motel blanket, scratchy on her skin, the darkness of the room, how confused she’d been, wondering where she was and how she’d gotten there. “Come on, baby, it’s time to go. He found us.”
Hannah looks over at Mark, who is snoring contentedly beneath the thick down duvet, and edges out of bed. She reminds herself that she’s not that little girl anymore, that she doesn’t have to run, that she’s safe here, and she tiptoes out of their bedroom as quietly as she can.
Downstairs, she opens her laptop, balancing it on her knees. The screen fills the dark room with an eerie silver glow as it wakes. Hannah navigates to her email server and, for the first time in months, logs in to the account that Mark doesn’t know exists.
She holds her breath while it loads, waiting to see if there’s any new correspondence. There isn’t. An empty inbox shines back at her. Relief, solid and sure, washes over her. She knows she’s taking a risk, but she had to be certain.
The bed upstairs creaks; the sound of Mark turning over in his sleep. Hannah quickly logs out of her account, erases her browsing history, and sneaks back into bed beside her husband.
10
Libby
Hawthorne Lane
Lucas shuffles into the living room, his soccer cleats flung over his shoulder. “I’m going to the field,” he declares succinctly.
Libby smiles at him, pleased that he decided to communicate in a full sentence for a change. “Have a great time!”
“Okay,” Lucas replies, though it’s more of a grumble than a word.
“Love you!” she yells at her son’s retreating back just before the door closes behind him.
Libby turns to her laptop, where the inventory spreadsheet she’s been working on stares back at her, the cursor blinking impatiently. The truth is that she should have finished with this ages ago, but her mind has been elsewhere. It’s been elsewhere ever since she overheard Beth Patterson speculating about Bill being in a new relationship. She wonders if it’s true. On the one hand, she’s noticed changes in Bill, a renewed youthfulness that wasn’t there only months ago, but on the other hand, Beth is known to be overtly jealous and a spiteful gossip, and Libby wouldn’t put it past her to have made the entire thing up.
If only there were some way to know for sure…Libby bites the edge of her thumb. She’s hesitant to ask Bill directly, not until she has something more to go on than conjecture she overheard at the supermarket. She thinks again of the kiss. They’re in a good place right now, and Libby doesn’t want to risk doing anything to mess that up, to set them back on the path they’d been on before, where she was the nagging wife and Bill was the husband who neededspace. If she’s wrong about this, Bill might take it as an accusation, an excuse to start pulling away from her again, and she can’t have that. Not when they’re just finding their way back to each other.
Libby’s fingers linger over her keyboard. She hasn’t done this in months. Not since Bill first moved out and she was desperate for any crumb of information about what he was doing in all that time and space he’d asked for. She knows it’s not right, that logging in to his email account is an invasion of his privacy that he wouldn’t take lightly. And yet it’s so easy to do, so easy, in fact, that she’s logged in to his account before she’s even fully thought it through. Bill has always had the same password for everything: BLL123. Bill, Libby, Lucas. All their initials lined up next to one another, right where they belong. It meant something to Libby when she first realized that he hadn’t changed it. But maybe, given recent events, it shouldn’t have. Maybe he was just being lazy. Either way, the password still works. She’s in.
At first, all she finds are coupon offers from various stores, a reminder to renew his real estate license by the end of the year, exchanges with prospective homebuyers. She knew this was a long shot. Who talks to his girlfriend over email? But just as Libby is about to give up and sign out of Bill’s account, something catches her eye. An email from an address she doesn’t recognize: [email protected]. The subject line:Forgetting something?She clicks to open it without a second thought.
Hey! Looks like you left your phone at my place last night. Just wanted to let you know in case you were looking for it. Guess you’ll have to come back tonight to pick it up… ;)
Libby feels her stomach plunge, nausea rising into her throat, as the irritating little winking emoticon stares out at her tauntingly.It’s true.It’s hard for Libby to wrap her mind around it. Bill.HerBill. With someone else. It feels impossible, and yet it’s so painfully real, written right there in black and white. Bill is dating. A woman named Heather Brooks, with whom he’s evidently spent at least onenight. Libby’s mind immediately begins spinning, catastrophizing. How long has this been going on? Is this woman the reason he’d walked out on Libby so suddenly? Isshethe reason Libby’s family is irreparably broken?
Libby can’t believe how foolish she’d been, trusting Bill the way she had. She was only nineteen when they’d met. She’d been too young, too naive, giving herself so freely to him, loving him so completely. Because here he is, casting her aside as casually as one might shuck off an old sweater.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not for her, and certainly not for Lucas. Libby knows all too well what it’s like to live in a broken home—something she’d never wanted for her own son. She was only nine years old when her parents divorced, her father having decided he was more in love with his secretary than with Libby’s mother, but despite her young age, Libby remembers the aftermath with vivid clarity—the strangled sound that escaped her mother’s lips the first time they pushed open the door to their new apartment, the one that always smelled of mildew no matter how much they tried to scrub it clean; her mother’s bad days, when she couldn’t get out of bed, when Libby would creep into her darkened bedroom just to remind herself that her mother was still there, that she wasn’t alone. “Don’t let this be your life, Libby,” her mother had said. “Don’t let yourself end up like me.” Libby looked at the hollow form of her mother curled up in her bed, her red-rimmed eyes, the sour sheets rumpled around her, and vowed to herself that she wouldn’t. She’d never put all her eggs in a basket she wasn’t holding.
But that’s exactly what she’d done, wasn’t it? Thanks to Lily Lane, Libby might be financially independent in a way her mother hadn’t been, but Libby understands now what her mother was trying to tell her. It wasn’t just about the money. She’d been warning her daughter about the dangers of putting her heart in someone else’s hands. How could Bill do this to her? To Lucas?
Something takes hold of Libby in that moment. A desperate need to put a face to the name of the woman who is ruining everything. She has to know who Bill has chosen over their family; she has to see for herself what Heather Brooks has that she, Libby, doesn’t.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, one quick search lands Libby on Heather’s public Instagram page.What did people do before social media?It’s both a blessing and a curse to be able to pull up an image of your husband’s lover at the click of a mouse.
Laid out before her is a grid of colorful, pixelated images of Heather Brooks. Tiny squares featuring Heather crossing the finish line of a half marathon, hands raised triumphantly, her dark ponytail swishing behind her; Heather on the bow of a boat, white sails billowing against the azure-blue sky above her head; Heather in front of the Eiffel Tower, a wine-colored beret on her head that would look absurd on Libby but somehow looks annoyingly chic on Heather. Libby clicks on a photo, enlarging it to full size. It’s a shot of Heather holding a martini, smiling as she leans against a wood-topped bar. She’s Libby’s polar opposite. Her hair is dark and sleek-straight where Libby’s is a mess of wild curls. Her body curves softly in all the places where Libby’s has always been stubbornly flat. She looks at least ten years younger than Libby, without the stretch marks and inevitable wear and tear that comes from carrying a child. In the photo, Heather is looking off to the side, a candid smile frozen on her face. It makes Libby wonder who took the photo, what made her smile that way. And then it makes her imagine Heather smiling at Bill and it’s almost too much to take.
Libby tears her eyes from the screen, her breath hitching in her throat as she stifles a sob with the side of her fist. Her gaze falls on the framed wedding photo of her and Bill that’s sat on the mantel for as long as they’ve lived on Hawthorne Lane. She has half a mind to grab it and throw it down now, to stomp on the image of those two smiling people over and over again until the glass shatters, shredding the photo behind it to tatters. But she doesn’t. She couldn’t. As hurt as she is, that day was still one of the happiest of her life. She can still feel the cool silk of her dress, the flowers woven into her hair. She remembers the warmth of the sun on her shoulders as they exchanged the vows they’d written themselves. They spoke about love at first sight, about fate and how they never would have met if Bill hadn’t been late for class that day, cutting across their college quad and running straight into Libby. Neither of them mentioned the baby that would someday be Lucas, the pregnancy shewas hiding beneath the layers of her dress, but she loved knowing that he was there with them. This tiny person they’d created together out of love. But now the memory sours, twisting and morphing in her mind into a grotesque facsimile of reality. In a flash, Heather is the one walking down the aisle toward Bill, tears of joy brimming in her round dark eyes.Sheis the one with flowers in her hair.Hersare the fingers laced through Bill’s as he says, “I do.”
A key turns in the lock and Libby slams the top of her laptop down just as Lucas walks into the living room, one of his friends trailing behind him.
“Started to rain. Can Justin and I hang out here instead?”
“Sure. Of course,” Libby replies, plastering a hollow smile onto her face. “I just finished working. I was about to head upstairs anyway.”
