Page 81 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
“I’m coming,” Libby replies resolutely. She needs to see Peter, or Dean, or whoever he is, for herself. This man that saw her broken heart and used it to his advantage. She deserves that closure.
“Me too,” Audrey adds.
Hannah nods solemnly. “Okay,” she says. “But we’d better hurry.”
She leads them all into the woods just as the first of the fireworks explode over Hawthorne Lane.
49
Georgina
Hawthorne Lane
The forest is unnaturally quiet; even the crickets have stopped chirping. Georgina, Hannah, Audrey, and Libby stare down at Dean’s dead body lying on the pavement of the jogging path. There’s a halo of red-black blood framing his head, and his complexion is pale and waxy under the light of the full moon. His eyes, clouded and lifeless, stare unmoving into the inky sky above their heads, and his jaw hangs slack, his lips parted in a silent gasp.
“He’s really dead.” Hannah is the first to speak, and when she does, she sounds almost skeptical, as if part of her still expects him to jump up and grab her.
Georgina squats down next to the body. She can’t think of it as a person. If she starts to think of the body as a person, she’ll have to think about the fact that her daughter killed him, and she’s not ready to grapple with that just yet. “It looks like he hit the back of his head on that,” she says, pointing to a large, jagged rock beside the body, the edge of which is smeared red with blood.
“He fell backward when Christina hit him with the flashlight,” Hannah explains, nodding. “He must have hit the rock on the way down.”
How is Georgina going to tell her daughter this? How will she ever be the same? As much as Dean might have deserved exactly what he got, Christina took a life, and under any circumstances, that has to be a heavy burden to bear.God, she’s only a child.Georgina chokes back a sob.
“Now what happens?” Libby says. When Georgina turns to look at her, she’s staring down at the body of the man she knew as Peter, her fingers trembling at her lips.
“We call the police,” Hannah says. “And whatever happens to me happens. Christina will be okay, though. It was self-defense. Surely the police will understand that.”
Georgina huffs. She’s supposed to put her daughter’s future in someone else’s hands? To unquestioningly trust that the police are going to do the right thing? In Georgina’s experience, the people who were meant to protect her—her parents, her husband—were the ones who ended up hurting her the most. But now Hannah expects her to believe that the police, a judge, a jury, will keep her daughter safe? No, it’s a risk she’s not willing to take. Georgina is going to have to look after Christina herself.
Georgina feels the anger rising in her like a tide. She imagines her daughter on a witness stand, reliving the worst moments of her life, cutting herself open, bleeding for a jury, begging to be believed, bargaining for her freedom. And what if they don’t believe her? What if they look at her and decide that she’d gone too far in protecting herself? What if they hold her accountable for saving her own life; what if, once again, an abuser wins? Georgina won’t let that happen.
And then there’s Hannah to consider. What happens to her in all this? Does she deserve to lose the life she made for herself here, and potentially her freedom, because of Dean? She already escaped him once, and it feels deeply unfair that it was all for nothing, that he’ll still drag her down with him in the end.But what if…what if…
“There’s another way,” Georgina says, the wisp of an idea forming, taking shape in her mind, becoming something solid and sure.
A crow calls out from somewhere among the shadowy tree branches, and Georgina imagines its curved beak, its sharp black eyes shining like polished stones, watching her in the dark, waiting for her to make a decision. She hears it take flight, feathery wings beating against the velvet night sky, and she nods. “Colin did this. Colin killed this man.”
“What?” Libby exclaims. “But…how?”
“I have an idea. But we’re going to have to do this together.”
Together they can do what Georgina could never do alone.
She’s done the research. She knows the statistics; she’s read them so many times that they’re burned into her memory. She knows that children who grow up surrounded by domestic violence experience significant psychological trauma that makes them more likely to commit suicide or acts of violence toward others, and that they’re three times more likely to be involved in domestic abuse in adulthood, repeating the cycle and becoming victims or abusers themselves. She looks at Hannah, thinks of the violence she endured at the hands of her father, how she escaped only to find herself married to another monster in a prettier disguise. How easily that could be her own daughter…how easily her son could become the monster.No more,Georgina decides.It ends now.
Georgina looks at her neighbors, her friends, their eyes wide with fear. No one speaks. They don’t agree, but they don’t object either.
She wonders what they must think of her, that she’s stayed with Colin for as long as she has. That it’s taken her all these years to break through the shame that kept her isolated from those closest to her. But Georgina isn’t alone anymore. “It’s the best solution. For all of us.”
She looks at Hannah, who deserves to keep her secret, her second chance, and Libby, who just hours ago was willing to do whatever it took to protect her son from Colin. And then her eyes meet Audrey’s.
50
Audrey
Hawthorne Lane
“I’m in.” The others look at Audrey in wide-eyed disbelief. “What? Colin deserves it,” she says, folding her arms over her chest. “You might not want to admit it, but we all know it’s true. Georgina is right. This is the best solution. Forallof us.”
