Page 78 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
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47
Georgina
Hawthorne Lane
Georgina watches Christina cross the street, weaving around the families who have set up their chairs in the cul-de-sac in anticipation of the fireworks, and step into the warm light of Libby’s front porch.
“You said we should talk,” Georgina says to Hannah, her eyes still lingering on her daughter as Bill Corbin opens the front door, welcomes Christina into the safety of their home. “So tell me.”
And Hannah does.
—
Georgina’s mind is reeling bythe time Hannah is finished. Her story, though so different than Georgina’s own, is, at its core, hauntingly familiar. But Hannah had done what Georgina wasn’t strong enough to do—she’d escaped. She’d started over, built a life for herself under a new name. For a moment, Georgina lets herself imagine what it would be like to be brave enough to do that, to start over, her and her children, far away from Colin. Someplace he could never reach them. She imagines herself in a little house in California. It’s nothing like the cold, sterile mansion on Hawthorne Lane. In California, there’s a tiny balcony where she can smell the ocean air as she sips her morning coffee, where sand is somehow always scattered on the floor and flip-flops are piled by the door. She pictures her family of three sharing a greasy takeout pizza and watching the sunset on the beach. It feels so tantalizingly real that Georgina can almost touch it.
And then the illusion shatters at her fingertips. Colin would come for them. He would find her and drag her back to hell, just as Dean has come for Hannah, clawing his way back from the dead to do it.
“I think Dean mistook Christina for me,” Hannah explains. “I was the one he was after.”
Georgina studies the younger woman, her slight build, her golden-blond hair so much like her daughter’s. She can see how it might have happened, the confusion in the dark.
“We’ll call the police,” Hannah says. “What Christina did was self-defense. I just thought you deserved to know the truth. I brought this to your doorstep, and I’m so sorry, Georgina. Truly I am.”
“But if we call the police…”
“They might find out that I’ve been living under a fake name. And Mark will too. I probably committed some sort of identity fraud; I almost killed a man, and I left the scene of an accident. I know all that. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. This is all my fault.”
“I want to see him,” Georgina says, her words slow and measured. Georgina thinks of Hannah, of the second chance she’d fought so hard for being ripped out of her hands. The one Georgina would kill to have for herself. She thinks of her daughter, so young and innocent, being assaulted in the dark, that man’s hands on her body. How scared she must have been, but how brave she was to have saved herself. And then she imagines the sirens, the handcuffs, her baby being pushed into the back of a police car and interrogated about something that wasn’t her fault. Something that the two women standing here now could have protected her from if they’d made different choices.
“Are you sure?” Hannah asks. “He wasn’t looking good when we left him. I think he hit his head on something when he fell. I didn’t want to tell Christina that, but there was a lot of blood. I’m…I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”
“I want to see him for myself before we make any decisions.”
Georgina walks over to her garage, lifts the door. She leaves thebloodied flashlight on Colin’s workbench, shrugs on a jacket two sizes too large for her, and closes the door once again.
She looks back at the house where her husband is sound asleep one last time. She told Christina she’d have her father handle this situation, but there are some things only a mother can do. “Let’s go,” she says.
48
Libby
Hawthorne Lane
Libby hands Christina a blanket. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asks.
“Yes, Mrs. Corbin. Thank you again.”
Libby wants to ask what put that haunted look in the young girl’s eyes, why she appeared so suddenly on her doorstep. But she doesn’t. She can sense that this isn’t the time, so she gently closes the door to the guest room.
The poor girl is obviously badly shaken, but she hadn’t offered much of an explanation about what happened, saying only that it was a “family emergency.” Libby wonders if it has anything to do with Colin and what he’d done to Lucas earlier in the day. Libby is still feeling pretty shaken by that herself, and she’s not a teenage girl.
It’s certainly been a strange night. First Peter disappears into thin air in the few minutes it took Libby to change her clothes, without so much as a text explaining his sudden departure, and then a little while later, Christina shows up out of the blue looking like she’d been through hell. Libby had meant to check in with Peter, make sure everything was okay, but she got distracted by Christina’s arrival. She pulls out her phone now, but there’s nothing new from him.
This isn’t like him,she thinks as she stares at the blank screen. She’s always known Peter to be rather communicative. She hopes there hasn’t been some kind of emergency with him too. Libby isn’t sure how many more fires she can put out today.
“Mom?” Lucas asks, tentatively poking his head into the hallway. “Is Christina okay?”
