Page 80 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
Goodbye, Bill,she thinks as he disappears into the crowd.
—
Libby watches the festivities playingout outside her window, the children running, the parents following behind them carrying half-eaten candy apples and plastic buckets filled with candy. It’s been a very long, emotionally draining day and she’s exhausted.
She’s about to turn away to check on Lucas and Christina when she sees something unexpected: Hannah and Georgina rushing down the sidewalk, their heads ducked low, Georgina bundled in an oversize hunting coat that Libby would have thought she wouldn’t be caught dead in.
“Hey!” Libby calls, but they don’t seem to hear her.
Libby quickly pulls on a pair of sneakers and yanks a jacket off the rack by her door.
By the time she steps outside, Hannah and Georgina are halfway down the block. And Libby, curious, sets off after them. Where could they be going in such a hurry? What kind of emergency necessitated Georgina sending Christina to Libby’s house?
“Hey!” Libby yells again as she draws nearer, jogging to close the gap between herself and the other women, but again she’s met with no response from her neighbors.
“Georgina!” she finally shouts. They’ve almost reached the woods, and Georgina turns and stops in her tracks, stiff-backed and rigid, under the broken streetlight. Libby wonders how long that light has been out and why she never noticed it before. “Georgina, what the hell is going on?” It comes out sharper than Libby intended, but she can’t help feeling irritated with the other woman. Georgina’s son and her husband hadassaultedLucas, and then she sent Christina over to Libby’s house without a word of explanation, and now here she is wandering through the fall festival, apparently without a care in the world. Did Georgina not feel that she owed Libby some answers?
“Libby, I…” Georgina starts, but the words trail off, carried away on the October wind. “Is Christina okay?”
Libby feels herself becoming exasperated. “She’s fine, but I’d like to know what this is all about. I think after what happened today, you owe me an explanation at least!”
“Georgina,” Hannah says, her voice gentle and coaxing, her hand touching Georgina’s wrist. “I think we need to tell her. She deserves to know. She’s mixed up in this too.”
“Mixed up in what?” Libby throws her hands up in frustration.
Georgina’s eyes slide toward old Ms. Woodrow’s house, where a television flickers through the living-room window. As she turns, her face is lit by a shaft of moonlight, and Libby gasps.
“Georgina, what happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Georgina replies. “It doesn’t matter now.”
A shiver of understanding trickles down Libby’s spine. “Was that…Colin? Did he do that to you?” In a flash, Libby can pictureit: Colin towering over his wife, the same way he’d done with Lucas, his hand reaching for her neck the way it had for Libby’s.
Georgina nods, her eyes unable to meet Libby’s as she adjusts her enviable red hair so that it conceals half her face as though by instinct. And Libby knows in her gut that this wasn’t the first time.
“Libby, there’s something you need to hear,” Hannah says. “It’s about Peter.”
“Wait—Peter?” The change in direction is disorienting. “What does Peter have to do with anything?”
“Hey!” A familiar voice calls. Audrey. She marches up to them, her hands shoved in the pockets of her coat. “Have any of you seen Seth? I’ve been out here looking for him for ages. He stormed off after the whole ordeal with Colin and—” She stops, her eyes passing over the group. Realization dawns on her face as she takes in the somber looks all around her. “Wait, did something happen?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Libby replies, her gaze landing on Hannah. “Will someone please tell me what exactly is going on?”
—
When Hannah finishes telling herstory, evidently for the second time that night, Libby feels like she’s going to be sick.
“So, Peter…” she says, trying to wrap her mind around what she’s just heard. “All this time he’s really been Dean?”
Hannah nods.
“Your abusive ex-husband, whom you thought you’d killed, tracked you down to Sterling Valley and was using me as a way to get to you?”
Hannah winces. “I’m sorry, Libby. I really am. But the man you thought you met…he’s not real. Dean is a con man. This is what he does. He shows you what he thinks you want to see. He uses people, hurts them, then throws them away when they no longer serve a purpose for him.”
Now Libby is sure she’s going to be sick. “And so, tonight, I invited him here…and now Christina…Oh God.” Bile rises in her throat.
“We’re going back there,” Georgina says. “To where it happened.”
