Page 50 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

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. Hannah has changed.

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 reading Brunch with the ladies in our favorite spot!

Below the image is a single line of text:

I found you, Maggie.