Page 65 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
Colin squeezes tighter, so tight that the edges of Georgina’s vision start to blur and stars burst before her eyes. She panics now, scrabbling at his hand, kicking, scratching, fighting for her life—but Colin is so much stronger than she is. He stands back, his wife pinned against the wall, watching her thrash like a fish on a hook. Georgina looks into his eyes, silently pleading with him to let her go, but the only thing she finds there is a void of cold detachment. He is no longer human. Maybe he never was.
Georgina can feel the moment that her body gives up. Her brain is telling her to fight, but she has nothing left to give. Her muscles slacken and her breathing slows. She is going to die.
Her last thought is of her children. How much she loves them, how sorry she is to be leaving them behind withhim.How, if she could go back, she’d do things differently. For them, for her. But it’s too late now. Her time is up. Georgina’s world goes black, and she begins to slip away, as quiet and unobtrusive in death as she was in life.
Colin lets go of her neck, and Georgina’s limp body falls to the floor. It takes her a moment to realize that she can breathe again, but when she does, she sucks in greedy gulps of air that feel like knives swallowed down her ravaged throat.
Her husband stands over her, casting a long dark shadow over her crumpled and broken body. And Georgina knows, with piercing certainty now, that it’s only a matter of time until he kills her.
38
Hannah
Hawthorne Lane
Hannah curls her knees up to her chest, wraps her blanket tighter around her shoulders. The porch swing creaks as it slowly rocks beneath her weight. Hawthorne Lane looks so different at night. The lush green lawns and vibrant fall foliage are hushed now, blanketed in silver moonlight. The usual sounds of whirring lawn mowers and laughing children are replaced with the distant hoot of a great horned owl, a chorus of chirping crickets. Hannah looks out over the darkened forest, the bristles of treetops that reach toward the glowing moon, and the dark copse of trees below them, so thick and deep that they blur into an endless black mass. Hannah wonders what kind of creatures come out at night when the curved paths belong only to them. When the mothers pushing strollers have safely tucked their children in for the night and the joggers have had their fill of nature and returned to the tidy confines of their big houses.
There’s a light out, she notices. One of the streetlamps meant to lull the residents of Hawthorne Lane into a false sense of security, a pretextual barrier between them and whatever lurks in the anonymity of those woods after dark.
Hannah should be asleep like everyone else in the darkened houses on her cul-de-sac, like Mark, who is upstairs in their bed, unaware that Hannah’s side is growing cold yet again as she wanders their property. She’s been so restless lately, her conversation with Mark hanging heavily on her mind. He was right to say what he did.Hannahhaschanged. Those anonymous notes have eaten away at her, turned her into the kind of person who is too afraid to be happy, who is so frightened of the future that she is destroying her present. She can feel it, the distance between herself and Mark, like a black hole that’s opened in the center of her, sucking up everything good and right that they’d built together.
She sits up straighter, pulls her laptop onto her lap. She brought it out here with her earlier. It’s become an addiction now, checking her secret email account, as habitual as brushing her teeth, driving to work. She lifts the top; the screen slowly wakes, and she navigates to her email account. The one that shouldn’t exist, the one she was supposed to get rid of three years ago. The one she isn’t sure why she kept but knew she had to. Just in case she ever had to go back there.
Hannah blinks at the screen. She shouldn’t be surprised—she’s been waiting for this moment for some time now—but yet she is. The inbox that has been empty for so long has one new message waiting for her. Hannah clicks to open it with a shaking hand. It takes a moment for the image to load, another for Hannah to process what she’s seeing. It’s the photo Audrey had taken at brunch weeks ago, an image of raised glasses clinking over a table strewn with menus and artfully arranged breakfast pastries, and there, in the edge of the frame, is Hannah. She zooms in closer, sees that it’s a screen grab from Audrey’s Instagram account with a caption readingBrunch with the ladies in our favorite spot!
Below the image is a single line of text:
I found you, Maggie.
39
Hannah
Hawthorne Lane
Hannah can’t breathe. She can’t move. She can’t think. She no longer hears the owls, the melodic song of the crickets. All she hears now is the roar of blood rushing in her ears. The world around her has melted away, ceased to exist outside of those four words:I found you, Maggie.
A scream pierces through the still night air and Hannah jumps up, her laptop falling onto the concrete at her feet with a clatter. They’re coming for her. She doesn’t know who sent that email, but whoever it is has found her. Has foundMark.Panic overtakes her, icy-cold fear flooding through her veins.
“Sorry,” a voice calls from the sidewalk, breaking through Hannah’s pulsing fear.
Hannah turns with a jolt to see the young woman who works as a nanny for the family down the block. She’s pushing a stroller around the rounded bend of the cul-de-sac, a thrashing baby kicking at the blankets inside. “Couldn’t get this little one to sleep. I thought a walk might help, but we didn’t mean to disturb you.”
Hannah tries to force a smile but her teeth rattle in her skull and her entire body quakes, a jumble of frazzled nerves.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” the young woman asks, the stroller coming to a stop in front of Hannah’s driveway.
“Y-yes,” she stammers, forcing out the familiar lie. She’s not okay. She may never be okay again. That email has changed everything.
“All right, then…” The woman eyes her skeptically as she takeshold of the stroller’s push bar and edges it forward. “Have a good night.”
Hannah watches her disappear down the block, back into the darkness, and those four little words round on her again in the silence. They spin and swirl in her mind, repeated over and over until the sounds lose all meaning, until they become an echo in her head, a broken record she can’t turn off:I found you, Maggie; I found you, Maggie; I found you, Maggie.
Hannah hasn’t heard that name in over three years. Not since the night of the accident. It all comes rushing back to her, so clearly that the memory is like a film projected in her mind.
She remembers the way Dean’s heavy black boots looked as he pushed down on the accelerator, how the red dial of the speedometer quivered as they barreled forward, Dean’s eyes on her and not the road. She remembers the feel of the Camaro’s back tires fishtailing across the pavement, and she remembers the moment she looked out the windshield and saw the guardrail ahead of them.
She saw it before Dean did, and by the time he processed what was happening, it was too late. He jammed on the brakes, the tires squealing, the smell of smoke and burning rubber filling the car.
