Page 51 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

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 found Mark. 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 takes hold 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.

Maggie didn’t know what to do. They were going to crash; they were going to die. She grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and pulled on it as hard as she could.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dean shouted, panic flooding his voice.

Maggie wasn’t certain, she just knew that she had to do something, that she couldn’t sit by and wait to die, forever trapped in that car with him.

The Camaro spun out of control, careening wildly across the pavement. They missed the guardrail but veered off the opposite side of the road. Maggie felt the asphalt give way to dirt and gravel, the last thing she remembers before they slammed into a tree and her world went dark.

When Maggie woke, she was lying against a deployed airbag, her ribs aching, her nose gushing thick red blood.

It trailed into her mouth, a viscous river.

She tentatively lifted one arm and then the other, rolled each ankle.

Though her entire body felt like it was on pins and needles, she was surprised to find that she was relatively uninjured.

Maggie sat up; the world spun around her, and her skull throbbed.

She lifted a hand to her forehead. More blood poured from an open gash.

But she was alive. She’d survived somehow. And then she looked at Dean.

He was collapsed over the steering wheel, his jaw slack, his arms limp at his sides.

Dean’s airbag hadn’t inflated, even though, Maggie saw, it was his side of the car that had collided with the tree; his window was shattered, the driver’s-side door dented in.

Maggie was certain Dean had never checked the airbags.

Never took the time to make sure the car was safe to drive.

But that didn’t matter anymore. Because Maggie had killed him.

When she’d grabbed that steering wheel and caused Dean to lose control of the car, she’d killed him.

It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident. That’s what she told herself, but somewhere in the back of her mind, a small voice reminded her that this was exactly what she’d wanted, what she’d wished for when she’d held that knife in her hand only hours before.

Maggie unbuckled her seat belt, pushed her shoulder, which screamed in pain, against the passenger door, and nudged it open.

“Mags.”

She heard it, her name nothing more than a exhalation, but it stopped her in her tracks as she was stepping out of the car. To freedom, to a world without Dean.

She looked back into the car as one of Dean’s eyes slowly fluttered open. “Help,” he breathed, blood bubbling from between his lips.

Maggie watched him, his feeble, wheezing breaths, the fear in the one eye he had managed to open.

But she made no move to help him. It was like she was frozen while the world still spun around her.

Maggie knew she should be feeling something in that moment—grief, guilt, regret—as she stood there, watching her husband’s breaths slow to nothing, his chest no longer rising and falling. But she felt nothing. Nothing at all.

It wasn’t until Dean’s eyes drifted closed and his pallor became a ghostly white that Maggie came back into her body.

She had no idea how long she’d been standing there watching him die, but her hands had grown numb with the cold by the time she forced herself to climb back into the car.

Maybe the crash had been an accident, but this, this was intentional.

She’d chosen to let Dean die. What had she done?

Maggie reached for Dean with an unsteady hand, the muscles of her arm protesting in burning pain as she held two fingers to his throat. She felt his blood, viscous and sticky between her fingers as she searched for the pulse she already knew she wouldn’t find. Dean was gone. She was a murderer.

I found you, Maggie. The words cut through the memory.

Someone knows what she did on the empty stretch of road that night.

Though Hannah can’t fathom how. She was so certain that they were alone, that no one was there to witness the most terrible thing she’d ever done.

And yet… She thinks of Mike, of his leering, oil-slick eyes, his promise that he’d make her pay her debt one way or another.

Has he somehow figured out that she survived the accident and he’s looking for what he’s owed?

Or is he after something else—retribution for his friend’s death?

Mike would have her old email address, Hannah supposes.

This is why she’d kept it active all this time, one final tether to her previous life that she’d never cut.

When her past came for her, she wanted to see it coming.

But now that it is, she doesn’t know how to stop it.

It’s barreling toward her like a freight train and she’s standing, frozen, on the tracks. I found you, Maggie.