Page 66 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

Halloween Night

One Year Later

“Definitely yours,” he replies, grabbing another handful of buttery popcorn from the bowl nestled between them. “But I’ll pause the movie for you.”

“All right,” Hannah says with an exaggerated sigh, tossing the warm blanket off her lap. “But don’t finish all the popcorn.”

“I make absolutely no promises to that effect!” Mark calls after her as she makes her way to the front door.

Hannah smiles to herself. A year ago she couldn’t have imagined them here.

Happy, together, with no secrets left between them.

It hadn’t been easy for Hannah to tell Mark the truth about her past, but in the end she felt she had to do it.

Once Dean and all the danger he brought with him was gone for good, Hannah knew she couldn’t live the rest of her life wondering whether she was as bad as Dean had been, if she’d conned Mark into loving a false version of her.

He deserved to know who he’d married, and, well, if he didn’t want to be with her anymore, maybe that was exactly what she deserved.

She’ll never forget how worried he looked when she sat him down on their living-room couch, took his hands in hers, and told him that they needed to talk.

It was hard to find the words, but she knew she had to say them. She had to do this for Mark. “I…I haven’t exactly been honest with you. About a lot of things. I’m not…I’m not who you think I am.”

Mark had looked confused at first as she explained that her name wasn’t really Hannah.

That before that, there had been Maggie, and Melody before her.

She watched his confusion turn to hurt as she told him she’d been married before and then to revulsion as she detailed the abuse she’d suffered at her husband’s hands.

Mark was quiet as she told her story, absorbing her truth, her pain, as if by holding it in his own heart, he could somehow take the weight of it from her.

Hannah told him about the drugs and the debt and the jam jar.

She told him about Mike, and Dean’s plan to rob houses on the wealthier side of town and the accident she’d caused trying to stop him.

Hannah’s voice faltered as she described what she’d thought were Dean’s final moments, when she left him to die, and the act of kindness from her best friend, Sam, who’d helped her escape in the only way she knew how.

Mark’s jaw clenched as Hannah told him that Dean had found her, that he’d come here, to Hawthorne Lane, for her.

“If he hadn’t mistaken Christina for me, if Colin hadn’t gone after him and killed him once and for all, I don’t know what would have happened,” she’d said. That secret was one she kept. It didn’t belong to her. That one belonged to Georgina, and it was one Hannah would take with her to her grave.

“Why,” Mark said after a long moment of silence, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I was afraid,” Hannah replied. “Of so many things. What you have to understand is that I’ve been doing this a long time.

Almost all my life. My mom taught me from a young age that I could never put my identity at risk, that I could never look back.

I had to become someone new. And I did. I didn’t feel like the same person when I was with you.

I wasn’t that person anymore. And I didn’t want my ugly past to ruin this beautiful life we’ve built together.

I was afraid that you’d hate me if you knew the truth, that I’d killed someone and walked away without a second thought.

But I was even more afraid that you wouldn’t hate me.

That you’d love me enough to keep my secret, to carry it with you, and you don’t deserve that, Mark.

What I did…it was illegal. I caused an accident that, as far as I knew, killed someone, and I just left him there.

I ran…And I didn’t want to put you at risk if I ever got caught.

“I thought about telling you so many times. I promise you I did. I hated keeping this from you. But then when those notes arrived, I knew it was too late. Someone knew what I did. I didn’t know who, but I knew they were coming for me.

That they were going to use my past against me somehow, and I couldn’t risk letting them bring you down with me.

Knowing the truth would only have put you in danger too.

“But that’s over now. Dean is gone. For good this time.

And so it’s time for me to stop letting my fear of the past dictate my future.

You deserve to know the truth. You’ve deserved it all along.

And now that you know it, I’ll understand whatever decisions you make from here.

Just please know that I love you, Mark. That part has always been true. ”

Mark’s jaw worked as he seemed to mull over everything she’d said. Hannah felt sick to her stomach. She was certain this was the part where he was going to leave her, to tell her that it was time for her to pack her things and go.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mark said, so quietly that Hannah wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

“None of it matters. You might have called yourself by a different name, you might have done some things you aren’t proud of, but you did what you had to do to survive.

I know you, Hannah. I know who you are in your heart.

That’s enough for me. The rest…the rest we face together.

No matter what happens. You aren’t alone anymore. ”

Hannah feels fresh tears welling in her eyes now as she recalls those words— You aren’t alone anymore— but she pulls herself together, puts on a cheerful smile as she opens her front door.

“Trick-or-treat!” It’s a little girl dressed as a daisy. Hannah recognizes her as one of the regulars at the library.

“What a great costume,” she says, dropping a handful of candy into the girl’s orange bucket.

“Thank you, Mrs. Wilson!” the child chirps as she skips off toward the next house.

Hannah watches her go, lingering in the doorway a moment, savoring the crisp fall air.

Halloween looks different on Hawthorne Lane this year. There is no fall festival. No candy apples or fireworks, no crowds of neighbors gathered on the street. The town has done its best to move on, but no one has forgotten what happened here last year. It’s changed them all.

Hannah followed Colin’s trial closely. She’d gone to the courthouse, slipping into the mass of people—residents and reporters—that gathered there.

Throughout the trial, Colin had maintained his innocence with unwavering conviction.

He denied seeing Dean, he denied knowing anything about his death.

His insistence was convincing, but Georgina’s and Audrey’s combined testimony told a very different story, one that painted Colin as a violent man consumed with rage, determined to seek vengeance on the man who’d hurt his daughter.

Hannah couldn’t tell which way the jurors were going to go, which side they were going to believe.

In the end, Colin had been his own worst enemy, despite his legal training.

His temper was the one thing he couldn’t control.

He scowled at his ex-wife on the stand and grumbled from the defense table as Audrey spoke, his lawyer constantly trying to rein him in.

It didn’t play well in front of the jury.

Colin had made it easy for them to imagine him as the reckless, vengeful monster the two women had described.

It also didn’t hurt that half the town had witnessed him assault a teenage boy mere hours earlier for simply holding his daughter’s hand.

The most interesting part of the trial, Hannah thought, was the part they hadn’t accounted for, the stroke of luck that fell neatly into their laps.

It came out during the prosecution’s case that Colin had taken sleeping pills on top of the copious amount of alcohol he’d been drinking at the fall festival earlier in the day.

Several witnesses confirmed they’d seen him drinking just before he lost his temper with Lucas.

The district attorney brought in an expert to talk about the dangers of mixing prescription sleeping pills with alcohol and described the known side effects—one of which was memory loss.

Hannah listened raptly as the doctor testified that he’d seen patients who had injured themselves or others in this condition but had no recollection of the event in the morning.

It was the perfect explanation for Colin’s adamant insistence that he hadn’t been in the woods with Dean that night and for why he hadn’t tried to hide the evidence of his crime before the police barged into his bedroom.

Colin’s attorney scrambled to refute the testimony, but it was too late.

The prosecution had already offered the jury an explanation they could hang their hats on, something that seamlessly tied together everything they’d heard.

And they handed down a verdict of guilty; Colin was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree.

The DA had been hoping for a murder conviction, but the jury found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Colin went into the woods with the intention to kill Dean that night.

(After all, he was only armed with a flashlight.) They did, however, believe that he intended to seriously injure Dean when he swung that flashlight at his head, and in doing so, caused his death when Dean fell backward and hit his head on a rock.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

A lot changed on Hawthorne Lane after the trial. Georgina quickly put her house up for sale, and it was bought by a young family with two small children, a girl and a boy. Hannah has seen them only briefly, shared waves from the ends of their driveways.