Page 60 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
“Please stop,” Maggie manages, her voice a strangled squeak.
“What did you say?” Dean smiles, a Cheshire cat grin. “I didn’t quite hear you.” He’s still not looking at the road, and Maggie knows it’s intentional. She knows he’s doing this to scare her.
“Stop!” she shouts. “That’s enough, Dean!”
The edges of his smile creak upward. “Didn’t think you had any of that left in you.” He pushes down even harder on the accelerator and the red dial of the speedometer quivers. Maggie can feel the back tires of the Camaro fishtailing across the pavement.
She looks out the windshield and her eyes go wide, the air vanishing from her lungs as she sees what’s ahead of them. “Dean!”
He looks now too, and he slams on the brakes. It’s the first time Maggie has ever seen him truly afraid.
35
Georgina
Hawthorne Lane
“What were you thinking?” Georgina shouts. She rarely loses her composure, but after the call she just got from Libby Corbin, she can’t help it.
Sebastian huffs. “Of course Lucas would go crying to his mommy.”
“That’s hardly the point, Sebastian!” Georgina throws her hands up in frustration. Behind her, the last rays of daylight stream in through the picture window of her kitchen, golden and bold. “You can’t just go around hitting people!”
“When he’s feeling up my sister, I sure as hell can.” Sebastian opens the refrigerator, pulls out a bottle of water.
His casual reaction to the whole ordeal has Georgina feeling irate. According to Libby’s frantic phone call, Lucas came home with a bloodied face. He didn’t want to tell his mother what had happened at first, but he eventually relented and informed her that Sebastian had punched him.Punched him!Georgina was equal parts mortified and horrified, issuing a slew of apologies to an incensed Libby. But Sebastian? He doesn’t seem the least bit fazed. He hurt someone, really hurt him, and as far as Georgina can tell, he doesn’t seem to care one bit.
“No!” she tells him. “No, you cannot! This isn’t how you deal with things, it’s just not…it’s not acceptable!”
“Well, I’m sorry if my behavior was not ‘acceptable’ to you”—he gestures quotation marks in the air—“but it’s already done, so I guess that’s that.” He chugs a long sip of water, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he tilts his head back.
“That is not that! You’re going to go upstairs and apologize to your sister, who is extremely upset over this entire episode, and then you’re going to apologize to Lucas.”
Sebastian sets his water down with such force that some of the liquid jumps from the bottle and splashes onto the counter. “Like hell I am.” His eyes narrow to slits as he glowers at his mother.
Who is this man?she wonders.What happened to the boy I raised?And then the guilt washes over her again. Guilt that she wasn’t a good enough mother, that despite her best intentions, she’d failed him somehow. Shemusthave, because here he is, fully formed and frightening. This, this anger, this rage inside him, surely it’s her fault. Perhaps it grew in the empty space between them, the gap she couldn’t close between mother and son. With Christina, it had felt so natural, so easy. The first time she’d held her daughter in her arms, she looked down into her big, round eyes and she knew that she belonged to her. But Sebastian…he’d always belonged to Colin. Perhaps it was the depression that consumed Georgina after his birth. Maybe he could sense that ugliness in her; maybe he’d felt it like a rejection that left him floundering for someone, anyone, to attach to. A drowning sailor desperately clinging to the only life ring in sight. Or maybe Colin had taken him, the son he’d always wanted, and slowly and methodically turned him away from the light of his mother’s love. Georgina can’t be sure how it happened; she knows only that she’d let him down, that one way or another, she’d lost him.
“You are going to apologize,” Georgina insists. “You are.” Because that’s what kind people do. They don’t just hurt someone and feel entitled to walk away without consequence. How could her son not know that? It can’t be too late to set him on the right path now. It just can’t. She can still be the parent he needs; she can still set this right.
“Enough!” Sebastian shouts, the deep timbre of his voice reverberating off the walls. “Leave it the fuck alone already!”
Georgina is stunned, her feet frozen to the floor. “Sebastian Pembrook! You absolutely cannot speak to me that way.”
Sebastian steps toward her and she sees a familiar glint in his eyes, an icy reflection of his father. “I said leave it alone!” he shouts, both of his hands rising to meet Georgina’s shoulders.
Sebastian shoves her, and Georgina feels her back collide with the hard stone of the counter before she falls to the floor. She scrabbles along the cool tiles, trying to pull herself to a sitting position, the small of her back already aching.
Sebastian takes a step toward her, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to reach down and help her, or maybe fall to his knees and cry tears of remorse for what he’s just done to his own mother. But he doesn’t. Instead, he stands over her, scowling down at her on the floor, disgust twisting his handsome face, as if she were something vile and loathsome.
“Are we finished talking now?” he says with a sneer. Then he turns and walks away.
Georgina hears the back door slam before she finds the will to get up. She does so gingerly, assessing the damage to her body. She’s not injured, not really, though she knows she’ll never be the same again nonetheless. Not after she’s seen what her own son is capable of. Georgina knows now that she’s let things go too far for too long. She’s allowed Sebastian to become the very thing she spent his entire life trying to protect him from: his father.
—
Georgina knocks on Christina’s bedroomdoor, her knuckles softly tapping the wood. “Honey, it’s me. Can I come in?”
“Okay.” Christina sighs dejectedly.
