Page 25 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
There, on her new white marble counter, sits a bouquet of blood-red roses tied with a black satin ribbon. Audrey lifts the bundle into her arms as cautiously as if it were a bomb. She searches for a card, though a part of her knows she won’t find one.Hemust have sent them. Not as a romantic gesture but as a warning that he won’t be ignored. A shot fired to remind her how easily he can overturn her life. Audrey’s jaw tenses; the musky scent of the roses is heavy and cloying in her nose.How dare he.
“No card, huh?” Seth asks.
Audrey whirls around to find him leaning against the entryway to the kitchen, arms folded over his chest. “Uh, no. They’re not from you?”
Seth’s scowl deepens.
“They’re probably from Arlene, then,” Audrey says, pivoting.
“Your boss atTop Castsent you two dozen red roses?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow.
“Had to have been. For all the extra hours I’ve been putting in. I can’t imagine who else would have sent them.”
“Really? No one else comes to mind? No one at all?”
Audrey’s fingers tighten around the bundled stems. She feels a thorn dig into the pad of her ring finger, a drop of warm blood sliding over her skin. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. But look, I’ll throw them out if they’re offensive to you for some reason.”
Audrey can see the moment the fight drains out of her husband, the anger he’d been clinging to like a life raft deflating beneath him, leaving him floundering in an endless expanse of hopelessness.
“I asked around, by the way.” His voice comes out heavy, defeated. “The tie clip doesn’t belong to anyone I know.”
Audrey opens her mouth and then closes it again. She wants to argue, to bury her indiscretion under an insurmountable mountain of lies, but she finds that she can’t bring herself to do it. She hardly recognizes this man standing before her. In just a few weeks, her husband has withered to a smaller, less substantial version of himself. The larger-than-life Seth Warrington pictured on the inside of his book jackets, the one with the cocky smile standing before a wall of his own books, is gone. This version of him looks so much more…human. Like someone she could break as easily as blowing dust from her palm.
“I’m going to take these outside,” she says, unable to meet his eye.
—
Audrey carries the roses intoher front yard. She holds them by the stems, letting them dangle upside down, dropping petals in a meandering trail as she crosses her lawn.
She opens the lid of the garbage can that sits politely at the curb in front of her house. It’s garbage day tomorrow, and she can’t be rid of these damn things soon enough. She drops the roses in, lets them fall atop the bundled bags of coffee grounds and greasy banana peels. She imagines them being picked up tomorrow, the beautiful, delicate blooms being chewed up by the metal jaws of the trash compactor.Good.He never should have sent them to her house.
She slams the lid of the garbage can, ridding herself of them, ridding herself ofhim,of his obtrusive presence in her house, in her marriage.
She jumps when she sees the figure standing just outside the amber glow cast by the streetlight across the lane. She’d thought she was alone out here. It’s a warm September night, but the sight of this man, standing so still, watching her in the dark, sends a chill shivering down her spine.
“Hello?” she calls, her quaking voice betraying her nerves.
He steps into the light then. Audrey takes in his familiar form, the tall stature, the broad shoulders, the golden-blond hair.Sebastian Pembrook.
He waves as he walks casually down the street, as though he hadn’t been watching her at all.
“Have a good night, Mrs. Warrington,” he calls.
17
Libby
Hawthorne Lane
Libby looks down at her phone, which fills the dark interior of her car with a blue-white glow. She slouches in her seat as her thumb scrolls over the screen.Heather Brooks.Her face is all Libby can see anymore. It haunts her at work, in the shower, while she’s stopped at red lights. Heather has become like a ghost that’s always hovering in the periphery of Libby’s mind. Ever since her argument with Bill, she’s been replaying his words in her head like lyrics from a scratched record:Things are getting serious.
She clicks on Heather’s most recent post, a photo uploaded three days ago, and studies the image that fills her screen: a key ring dangling from Heather’s long manicured fingers with a caption readingKey to his heart <3.(The woman’s overuse of emoticons seems to be her only flaw, as far as Libby can tell.)
Libby wonders what the other woman thinks of her. She wonders if she thinks of her at all. Is Heather aware that she’s the antagonist in Libby’s story, the one who swooped in and carried away all the broken pieces of her marriage and reassembled them for herself? Probably not. She imagines the lines Bill would have fed his young, gullible new girlfriend. She’s sure they were something clichéd and middle-aged.We were just too young when we got marriedandMy wife never really understood me, not like you do, babe.Something that would make Heather want to fall into his arms, kiss the pain away. Libby shudders at the thought.
She looks again at the photo of the key, a blurry brick building inthe background. It’s Bill’s town house. She recognized it instantly from all the times she’s dropped Lucas at that very building, but she couldn’t believe Bill would really ask this woman to move in with him. How could he possibly be that serious about her? Libby can’t even imagine herself kissing another man, never mindlivingwith one. She pictures their things side by side: Heather’s clothes hanging in the closet next to Bill’s, their shirtsleeves touching, her shoes beside his in the entryway, her pink toothbrush sharing a cup with Bill’s blue one. Something about the intimacy of it, of all the simple, inconsequential things that add up to a life together, causes an aching pain in Libby’s chest. She’s mourning, she realizes. As if her marriage had been a person, its own living, breathing entity, a life created by her and Bill, as real as Lucas. She can’t understand how he could so callously snuff out this precious thing they’d made.
It’s possible that Libby is wrong. She doesn’t mean to get ahead of herself. Maybe Bill just gave Heather a spare key for emergencies, and the girl took to social media to make it look like something more. Maybe Libby overreacted to the photo of the key; maybe she’s making a mountain out of a molehill. Or maybe it’s exactly what it looks like…
