Page 61 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

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?”

Libby wants to lie to him, tell him that there’s nothing to worry about, but she finds that she can’t.

Her son is not a child anymore, and not every story has a happy ending.

“I’m sure she will be. All we can do is be here for her right now.

Just keep an eye on her, okay? Let me know if she needs anything. ”

Lucas nods. “Yeah. I will.”

Libby looks at her son, nearly a man now, as he stands protectively outside the guest room, and she’s overcome with emotion.

“I love you,” she says.

Lucas grins, and for a moment he’s her little boy again. “I love you too.”

“I know this past year has been hard on both of us, but you’re a good kid, Lucas. I’m proud of you, of the man you’ve become. I hope you know that.”

“I know.” He looks down at the ground. “And, Mom? I’m proud of you too. Thanks for, you know, being here.”

Tears gather in the corners of Libby’s eyes. “Always,” she says, as she turns and heads back downstairs.

“All good?” Bill asks as she walks into the kitchen.

The sight of him there, drinking coffee from her favorite mug, Jasper sprawled at his feet, is comfortingly familiar and yet so out of place, as if he’s always been a visitor just passing through.

The anger Libby felt at him earlier, her searing jealousy over Heather’s pregnancy, had drained out of her after her confrontation with Colin, Bill jumping in to protect her.

All that’s left is a sort of nostalgic emptiness, a hollow resignation that echoes with the promise of what they could have been.

“Yeah,” Libby replies. “Christina wanted to get some rest.”

“Did she tell you any more about what happened?”

“No.” Libby pulls out a stool from under the counter and perches on it. “She didn’t.”

Bill leans against the counter, the mug cradled in both hands.

For a moment they’re both silent, existing in the rare peace that’s settled between them.

“I didn’t mean for things to be this way between us.

” Bill’s words come to her softly, and, for the first time in nearly a year, Libby gets the sense he’s letting his guard down, that, finally, he’s not pushing her away.

“You were right about what you said. I should have tried harder to work through things, to fix us, instead of walking away. I should have told you how I was feeling sooner. I just…I didn’t know how.

Not until it felt like it was too late to fix it. ”

“And I should have realized how unhappy you were,” Libby concedes. “I think maybe I did know, on some level. I just didn’t want to face it.” It’s an admission, Libby realizes, that has been a long time coming. A truth she hadn’t, until now, wanted to admit even to herself.

They haven’t made things easy on each other, she and Bill.

When Bill ended their marriage, it felt like a sudden blow to Libby.

A hasty decision, cavalierly made. She’d been blindsided by it and so she’d lashed out, blaming Bill for everything that had gone wrong in their lives.

She’d wielded her pain like a sword to cut him down with, and the more she swung at him, the farther he backed away from her.

But it hadn’t been sudden to Bill, had it?

His leaving was something he’d been building toward, slowly preparing himself for, so by the time he’d ended things, he’d already put up walls around himself, so thick that they’d felt impenetrable to Libby.

They’d both made so many mistakes. If only he’d talked to her sooner. If only she’d been easier to talk to…

“I still can’t believe I’m going to be a father again,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “At my age! This wasn’t exactly the plan…”

“I know. Or at least, I suspected.”

“I never meant to hurt you or Lucas.”

“I know that too.” Libby looks down at the counter, tracing circles with her finger. “But life doesn’t always go according to plan.” A fact Libby has only recently come to accept.

She lifts her head, watches the familiar scene before her, Bill rinsing his mug in her sink, and she sees, for the first time, how much he’s changed.

He’s no longer the boy she’d met at nineteen.

Libby feels like she’s lived one thousand lives since then.

She’s changed—through motherhood, through the career she built for herself—she’s grown and evolved and become someone new.

And she understands now that Bill changed too.

How had she not realized it sooner? Although they’d navigated the currents of life together, the tides shaped them in different ways.

Formed them into people who no longer fit together.

All this time she’s been clinging to a version of Bill that no longer exists. Perhaps it’s time now to let him go.

“You’re going to be a great dad,” she tells him. It’s a peace offering, an olive branch extended, but she finds that she means it too. In a flash, she pictures Bill pushing a little girl on a swing, teaching another little boy with his distinctive smile how to catch a ball. “You always have been.”

“I can’t tell you how much it means to me to hear you say that.” Bill turns to face Libby, drying his mug with a tea towel, and their eyes meet.

They’re going to be okay . Things will never be the same between them, but they’ll be okay. Libby will be okay.

Bill places the mug back in the cabinet. “I’m going to head home. But you call me if you guys need anything. Anything at all, okay? I can be back here in fifteen minutes if you need me.”

“We’re fine. Thanks, Bill. I’ll walk you out.”

Libby follows Bill to the door and watches him walk down her front steps. He stops as he reaches the driveway and turns back to look at her one last time, his hand raised in parting.

Goodbye, Bill, she thinks as he disappears into the crowd.

—

Libby watches the festivities playing out 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 had assaulted Lucas, 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 picture it: 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 her story, 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.”

“I’m coming,” Libby replies resolutely. She needs to see Peter, or Dean, or whoever he is, for herself. This man that saw her broken heart and used it to his advantage. She deserves that closure.

“Me too,” Audrey adds.

Hannah nods solemnly. “Okay,” she says. “But we’d better hurry.”

She leads them all into the woods just as the first of the fireworks explode over Hawthorne Lane.