Page 50 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
That night, she waited until Colin fell asleep and then carried her two beautiful sleeping babies into the car and strapped themsecurely into their car seats. She didn’t have a plan, she didn’t know where she was going, but she knew she couldn’t raise them in that house. Not with him. He was going to ruin them, her perfect, innocent babies.
Georgina closed the passenger doors as quietly as she could, but when she turned around to get into the car, Colin was standing in their driveway, his eyes glinting menacingly in the moonlight.
“Going somewhere?”
“I can’t live like this, Colin,” she’d said, a slight tremor in her voice at the sight of him.
“And what is your plan, exactly? You have no job, no money of your own, no friends, nowhere to go.” He smiled then, his teeth a flash of white in the dark, and Georgina had never hated him more. It was the first time she’d realized that he’d done this on purpose, that he’d trapped her. He’d built her a gilded cage and she’d naively walked right into it.
“I’d rather live on the streets than with you.”
“You’re certainly welcome to do that,” Colin said calmly. “But you aren’t taking my children with you. If you leave, I can promise you that you’ll never see them again. I’m a lawyer, remember? A partner at one of the biggest firms in the country. I know every judge in this county and the next, and every single one of them loves me.”
Georgina could picture it, Colin laughing in the courtroom, charming the judges he practiced in front of like he did everyone else.
“There’s not a chance in hell that you walk away with these kids,” he continued. “So just know that if you leave, you’re leaving them behind.”
Georgina knew he was telling the truth. Colin would fight tooth and nail to keep her children away from her. Not because he wanted them but because he didn’t want her to have them. That would be her punishment for daring to walk away from him. She could fight back, she could try, but he would win. He always did.
“You can’t give them the kind of life that I can,” Colin added as if reading her mind. He had so much while she had so little. “Look at all of this.” He swept his arm across the view of their beautiful house,their quiet cul-de-sac. “It’s everything you ever wanted for them, isn’t it? So much more than you ever had. Are you going to take that away from them?”
Georgina looked through the car window at her peaceful, sleeping babies, at their tiny, innocent faces. If she left Colin, she’d risk leaving them withhim.Who would protect them then?
“And if you do,” Colin said with a sneer, “if you leave me, if you leave these kids, I’ll never let them forget it. I’ll make sure they know exactly what kind of mother you were.”
Georgina opened the car door and lifted Christina from her car seat. Her infant daughter curled into a tiny ball, her breath soft on Georgina’s neck as she held her close. Georgina imagined the things Colin would tell her as she grew older, the lies he’d feed her, poisoning her against her mother. She knew then that there was no escape.
Georgina would have given it all up. The nice neighborhood. The big house. The money, the comfort, the status. None of it was worth the price she was paying. But she’d never risk losing her children.
“You belong to me,” Colin says now, his eyes like burning coals raking over her exposed skin. “And you will not lie to me again.”
“I’m s-sorry,” Georgina says, her words as broken as she is.
“Well, luckily for you, I know exactly how you can make it up to me.” Colin reaches for his belt, the metal buckle jangling as he unfastens it.
30
Maggie
Benton Avenue
Maggie feels numb as she walks through her front door, then pushes it closed with a creak that seems to echo through the small house.The drugs are gone.She lost them. Whatever happens next is going to be all her fault.
A part of her wants to tell Dean the truth. To get it over with quickly, come clean and plead for his forgiveness. But a larger part of her is afraid of how he’ll react.
She pads into the bedroom silently, like a ghost moving through her own home, and finds Dean pacing the floors, his hands running through his thick dark hair over and over again.
He stops immediately when he sees her, zeroing in on her with laser focus. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I had to run some errands,” she lies. She sees then that his pupils are dilated to the size of dinner plates. It’s like looking into two endless black voids. Maggie finds it unnerving.
“You had to run errands now? When we’re in the middle of a fucking shitstorm?” He doesn’t wait for Maggie’s reply, just barrels ahead, the words leaping manically from his tongue. “It doesn’t matter. I figured out how to solve our little problem. I came up with a plan and it’s fucking brilliant.”
“A plan?”
“Yeah. See, next week is Halloween!”
“I know, but—”
