Page 72 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
She watches as Peter turns to face Hannah, smiling brightly as he extends his hand to her, but Hannah doesn’t return the gesture. In fact, she looks from Libby to Peter and back with the strangestexpression on her face. Libby realizes the state that she’s in—wine splashed down her shirt, her hair a wild mess of curls. She must look absolutely deranged.
“If you’d both excuse me for just a moment, I should probably change out of these clothes. I’ll be right back.” She opens the door and dashes inside, leaving Peter and Hannah alone together.
43
Hannah
Hawthorne Lane
“Dean? What—what are you doing here? H-how—” Hannah stammers.
“It’s nice to see you too,Hannah.”
Bile rises in Hannah’s throat at the sound of her new name on his lips. Dean looks different these days—less lean than she remembers him, with his hair combed neatly to the side and glasses perched on his nose. He’s dressed differently too, in khaki slacks and a button-down shirt, no hint of the leather jacket and boots that she sees so vividly in her mind whenever she thinks of him. Though when she does think of him, it’s usually of the last time she saw him: one eye swollen shut, the pink-tinged spittle that foamed between his lips as he used his last breaths to plead with her for help that would never come.
How is this possible? How could Dean have survived the accident? All this time she thought he was dead, that she’d killed him. Hannah feels herself going back there, falling into the memory. She’d limped away from the Camaro, from the smell of burning rubber and leaking gasoline, her body aching with pain, her mind capable of forming only one thought:Run.She’d tried, forcing one foot in front of the other, faster and faster, feeling her feet colliding with the asphalt of the desolate road, the sensation reverberating painfully through her shins. But she ran. As best she could, she ran. And as she did, the fog began to lift; her thoughts began to clear. The numbness that had taken her over earlier, allowed her to do thething she knew she needed to do, subsided and reality broke over her like a cresting wave. She had left Dean to die. She hadn’t called for help; she hadn’t tried to save him, to pull him from the wreckage. Because she’dwantedhim to die. It was the only way she’d ever be free.
But she hadn’t killed him. Because now he’s here, standing on Libby’s porch, calling himself Peter.
“What do you say we go for a little walk?” He loops his arm though Hannah’s, pinning her to his side as he leads her away from Libby’s house.
“How did you find me?” Hannah asks as they walk, her voice quaking. She feels like a prisoner being led down death row.
“Did you know that when you marry one of those high-society types, there’s usually an announcement in the newspapers about it?” He speaks so casually, as if they’re just out for an evening stroll. “There was a photo of you and everything, right under your new name, Hannah Wilson.”
Hannah thinks of Mark’s mother. How appalled she’d been by their insistence on a small wedding. She must have taken it upon herself to run the marriage announcement.
“I’d been looking for you for a long time, Maggie. Ever since you tried to kill me three years ago. Truth be told, I’m not a patient man, but when I want something badly enough, I’m willing to do what it takes. I knew it was only a matter of time until you scurried out of whatever hole you were hiding in. Rats always do, eventually. I paid for a subscription to a service to alert me if a photo of you ever surfaced online. It took a few years, but then there you were. And I had the name of your new husband too. That was an unexpected windfall that made it pretty easy to track down his address in Manhattan. Of course, you’d already moved, but I had no way of knowing that then. I sent a few letters. I hope you got them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was you in the letters? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
“It was a lot more fun this way, don’t you think? I wanted you good and scared, thinking about everything you’d done, before I showed up. I wanted that moment—I wanted to see the look onyour face when you realized I’d come back from the dead. I do love a good surprise. Take, for instance, finding a second photo of you online, only months after the first. It’s funny how life works sometimes. It took me almost three years to find you the first time, and then, surprise! There you were again in a photo posted on a public Instagram page by someone named Audrey. Out to a fancy brunch like you’re some sort of socialite now.”
Dean yanks Hannah’s arm, pulling her off the road and onto the path through the woods.
“I will say,” he continues, “I never took you for the type.” His eyes trail over the contours of Hannah’s body before landing on the diamond engagement ring that sits on her left hand. She tries to pull away from him, but he holds her tight, a look of disgust souring his face as he stares at the stone.
She’s become the very thing he hates most in the world, the type of person he’s always been obsessively jealous of. Dean might not have known Hawthorne Lane existed before he found her—they’d lived in another town, far from here, but one that had its own version of Hawthorne Lane. The type of place where the streets are lined with big houses, expensive SUVs parked in every driveway. Where the men dress in suits each morning and the women casually wear diamonds worth more than Dean could make in a year. He hates her, Hannah knows. Not just for what she did to him but for who she’s become without him.
“I befriended your neighbor, the one tagged in the photo, to get closer to you,” Dean continues. “Libby. Found her on a dating website. Honestly, I wish I had thought of that back in the day. It’s a great angle. And you gave me the idea, you know. New name, new me! Anyway, Libby practically welcomed me into her life with open arms. If she had been my mark, it would have been all too easy. But Libby was just a means to an end. You were the one I wanted, Maggie. And thanks to Libby’s endless droning, I learned quite a bit about your new life. Like your address here on Hawthorne Lane. And the kinds of people you associate with now, about the comings and goings of the neighborhood. I needed to know what I was walking into.” He glowers at her. “Seems to me you did pretty well foryourself. But while you were off convincing some rich moron to marry you,Iwas going through hell.”
Hannah bites her tongue at the mention of Mark. She wants to defend him, tell Dean that he doesn’t know the first thing about him, but she knows it will only make him angrier.
“I got lucky that night,” Dean says, leading Hannah farther into the darkened woods, farther away from the festival and anyone who might be able to help her. “A car came down the road, saw the wreck. They called for an ambulance. The doctors at the hospital told me I was lucky to be alive, that I’d barely had a pulse. If I’d gotten there only a few minutes later, I wouldn’t have survived. But Ididsurvive. No thanks to you.”
Hannah thinks back to that moment, her shaking hand searching for Dean’s fading pulse beneath the congealing blood. She must have missed it; she must have made a mistake.
“Not that it was easy, mind you,” Dean continues. “There were so many surgeries, months of rehab. I couldn’t even stand up to take a piss by myself. Not that you cared.”
He stops then, grasps Hannah tightly by the upper arm and forces her to look at him. “When they cut me loose, I went home and found the house ransacked. The guys Mike worked for, it turns out they weren’t willing to wait for me while I got back on my feet. They took my bike, took everything that wasn’t nailed down, to settleourdebt. And then Mike cut me loose too. After all the years we’d known each other, he said I’d become too much of a liability. That he never wanted to see my face again. So there I was, barely able to walk, with no one to take care of me and nothing left to my name. And do you know whose fault that was, Maggie?” He glares at her, his eyes shining like onyx in the light of the full moon as he leans in closer. “Yours.”
44
Hannah
Hawthorne Lane
Hannah twists her body, pulling her arm from Dean’s grasp. She briefly catches the look of surprise that flashes across his face as she turns and begins to run. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she knows she can’t slow down even as she leaves the safety of the paved path, crashing through thickets of knotty branches and creeping vines that grab and claw at her as she passes.
