Page 18 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

Libby

Hawthorne Lane

Libby looks down at her phone, which fills the dark interior of her car with a blue-white glow.

She slouches in her seat as her thumb scrolls over the screen.

Heather Brooks. Her face is all Libby can see anymore.

It haunts her at work, in the shower, while she’s stopped at red lights.

Heather has become like a ghost that’s always hovering in the periphery of Libby’s mind.

Ever since her argument with Bill, she’s been replaying his words in her head like lyrics from a scratched record: Things are getting serious.

Libby wonders what the other woman thinks of her.

She wonders if she thinks of her at all.

Is Heather aware that she’s the antagonist in Libby’s story, the one who swooped in and carried away all the broken pieces of her marriage and reassembled them for herself?

Probably not. She imagines the lines Bill would have fed his young, gullible new girlfriend.

She’s sure they were something clichéd and middle-aged.

We were just too young when we got married and My wife never really understood me, not like you do, babe.

Something that would make Heather want to fall into his arms, kiss the pain away. Libby shudders at the thought.

She looks again at the photo of the key, a blurry brick building in the background.

It’s Bill’s town house. She recognized it instantly from all the times she’s dropped Lucas at that very building, but she couldn’t believe Bill would really ask this woman to move in with him.

How could he possibly be that serious about her?

Libby can’t even imagine herself kissing another man, never mind living with one.

She pictures their things side by side: Heather’s clothes hanging in the closet next to Bill’s, their shirtsleeves touching, her shoes beside his in the entryway, her pink toothbrush sharing a cup with Bill’s blue one.

Something about the intimacy of it, of all the simple, inconsequential things that add up to a life together, causes an aching pain in Libby’s chest. She’s mourning, she realizes.

As if her marriage had been a person, its own living, breathing entity, a life created by her and Bill, as real as Lucas.

She can’t understand how he could so callously snuff out this precious thing they’d made.

It’s possible that Libby is wrong. She doesn’t mean to get ahead of herself.

Maybe Bill just gave Heather a spare key for emergencies, and the girl took to social media to make it look like something more.

Maybe Libby overreacted to the photo of the key; maybe she’s making a mountain out of a molehill.

Or maybe it’s exactly what it looks like…

That’s why she’s driven here tonight. She was home earlier, all alone, Lucas having stayed over at Justin’s house, letting her imagination run wild, and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore.

The not knowing. She’s grown so accustomed to knowing everything about Bill.

She knows his favorite brand of socks, that he never eats the last bite of a banana, and that sometimes his left knee hurts when it rains, a holdover from a car accident he’d been involved in years ago.

And now they weren’t even speaking to each other.

They hadn’t exchanged one single word since their argument.

Libby hated the idea that she didn’t know this most basic thing about him now—if he was living with someone new.

It was a glaring reminder of how much of him she was losing.

She told herself that if she just knew, she could learn to live with it.

Anything had to be better than dwelling on the maybe s and what-if s.

And so Libby grabbed her keys, slid her feet into a pair of sneakers, drove across town, and parked outside Bill’s town house, ready to find out the truth one way or another.

But now that she’s here, the insanity of the situation is dawning on her. She knows she has absolutely no business being here. And yet…and yet, she can’t help but stare up at Bill’s window, waiting to catch sight of something she’s not sure she wants to see.

Libby bites at the skin on the edge of her thumb.

It frightens her a little, the sense that she’s losing control.

She wishes she were a different kind of person.

She wishes she didn’t feel things as intensely as she does; she wishes she could focus her thoughts on anything but Bill and Heather.

But she can’t. No matter what she does, her mind always finds its way back to the other woman.

Libby hopes that if she sees for herself that Bill has chosen Heather, that he’s really and truly moved on from their marriage, it will set her free, maybe allow her to do the same.

But so far, all Libby has seen is the glowing lights of his living room, the occasional flicker of a nearby television.

She shifts in her seat, her lower back aching as she does. It’s just another reminder that she’s getting old. That she’s no longer the fun, youthful version of herself she was when she first met Bill. That she’s not Heather.

Maybe she should just go home. It was a mistake to come here in the first place. What if Bill happens to look through the window and spots her car? Libby feels a clawing heat rising up her neck at the thought. She really needs to get herself under control.

She turns the key in the ignition, and her Chevy Traverse rumbles to life beneath her.

She casts one last look at Bill’s window as she grips the gearshift, and that’s when something catches her eye.

The flickering lights of the television suddenly stop.

Libby takes her hand off the shifter and sits up taller in the driver’s seat.

She watches the window, waiting, her breath held in her throat.

She watches as Bill walks in front of the glass, stretching, his arms lifted over his head, and she feels a tiny thrill that something is finally happening.

With the lights on inside his house, she can see him only in silhouette, but it doesn’t matter.

She’d know her husband anywhere. And then she sees her.

A woman, petite and slim, stepping into the light.

Libby watches as her husband, the love of her life, wraps his arms around another woman.

She watches as he kisses her, his hand sliding up the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her hair.

It looks so familiar that Libby lifts her hand, touches the back of her own head.

She can almost feel Bill’s fingers there, the way he’d bury them in her curls.

And then she watches as he lifts the woman into the air, her shapely legs wrapping around his waist, and Libby feels something inside her changing.

The soft vulnerability of her broken heart hardening into a granite anger.

Libby feels this new thing flooding through her veins like fire.

She lets it wash over her, basks in the warmth of it.

She lets the rage fill her, burning away the sadness that has weighed her down for the past nine months, reducing it to smoldering ash.

Libby doesn’t know how she’s supposed to contain it, this roaring, destructive thing that now sits in her chest like a ball of fire, and for the first time in her life, she doesn’t know that she wants to.

For as long as she can remember, Libby has bent and contorted herself to fit the needs of others, especially her husband.

She held herself back, made herself smaller, shrank from conflict, and put everyone before herself.

And where has that gotten her? Here. That’s where.

Alone in her car in the middle of the night, watching her husband grope her replacement.

No, Libby is done being a doormat. She’s done standing idly by and watching some other woman live the life that was supposed to be hers.