Page 86 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

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 perfectexplanation 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.

As Hannah closes her front door, she slips her phone out of her pocket and pulls up the most recent photo Georgina sent. It’s of Georgina, her hair cut short, a glass of ruby-red wine in her hand, standing barefoot on the balcony of her new house in front of a California sunset. She looks so much happier there, the smile on her face more genuine than Hannah had ever seen it on Hawthorne Lane. And Hannah is happy for her. She deserves this, her second chance. They don’t speak often, but when they do, Georgina tells her that they’re doing well, that Christina is blossoming at UCLA, where she was accepted for a fellowship exchange program for creative writing, and that they’re all making progress, slowly but steadily, in family therapy. Even Sebastian has started to open up to her about the things he witnessed in his childhood. It sounds as if it hasn’t been easy for any of them, but Hannah is glad they have one another to lean on as they heal from all they’ve been through.

Sometimes Hannah worries about what will happen toGeorgina, to all of them, when Colin is released from prison, but she reminds herself things will be different then. Colin’s hold over Georgina came from his influence as a lawyer, his threat to turn her children against her, but by the time he’s a free man, all of that power will have been stripped away from him. And besides, Georgina is no longer the same woman she was on Hawthorne Lane. She has friends in California, neighbors, classmates from her culinary courses, and she has Hannah and Libby and Audrey and the support of everyone who has now heard her story.

Audrey made sure of that. After Colin’s trial, and with Georgina’s blessing, she wrote a two-page spread forTop Casttitled “Killer in Bed” that featured an inside look at Colin’s trial and provided a raw and powerful account of her experience with intimate partner violence and stalking. The piece was brutally honest and unapologetically real, just like Audrey.

Though Audrey’s marriage to Seth didn’t survive the fallout of her affair, from what Hannah can tell, Seth has been doing rather well for himself since their divorce and subsequent departure from Hawthorne Lane. After a stretch in a rehabilitation center, he’d gone public about his struggle with depression and substance abuse. Though Hannah can only imagine how difficult that must have been for him, she’s heard talk that he’s booked a national tour of motivational speaking engagements to share his story about the road to recovery. Hannah hopes that both he and Audrey find what they’re looking for in their new lives.

“You coming?” Mark calls from the living room.

“Just a second,” Hannah replies.

She takes one last lingering look out her front window. At theFor Salesign that swings in the breeze in front of Libby’s house, Bill Corbin’s smiling face beaming out from the placard. She’s seen him and his adorable baby daughter in the neighborhood a few times these past months. He seems happy and also completely exhausted.

Hannah spoke to Libby about the night Dean died only once. It seemed to be a tacit agreement among all of the women that they’d never mention it again, but there was something Hannah needed to understand.

She’d approached Libby while she was sitting outside reading a book.

Libby set it down as Hannah climbed the steps to her front porch, a look on Libby’s face that suggested she knew what Hannah had come for.

“Why…” Hannah started, searching for the right words. “Why did you help us?”

Libby thought for a moment, her fingers toying with the pages of the book in her lap. “I wasn’t sure I was going to go through with it. Right up until I made my statement to the police, I wasn’t sure. It’s not that Colin didn’t deserve what he got, but I just wasn’t certain I could do it. I thought about you, and Georgina, and even Audrey. I thought about what he’d done to Lucas and what Pete—er, Dean—had done to me. But that wasn’t why I did it. In the end it was something Georgina had said about Christina, that she didn’t deserve to have to carry the weight of the truth of what happened that night. She’s just a kid. Like Lucas. This really was the least Colin could do for her, for his family.”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “I really am. For my part in it. For what Dean put you through.”

“You know,” Libby mused, “it’s okay. I jumped into the whole dating thing before I was really ready because I thought it was what Ishouldbe doing. Because it was whatBillwas doing. Not because it was what was right for me. For the first time since I was nineteen years old, I’m not in a relationship. Can you believe that? I’m finally getting to know myself not as half of a partnership but for who I am and what I’m capable of on my own. It’s made me realize that I can have a fulfilling life without forcing the whole dating thing. I don’t need a relationship to define me. I’m enough on my own.”

“You are,” Hannah agreed, awed by Libby’s strength. “You really are.”

“I’m not saying I’ll never date again or that it’ll be easy to open up to someone when I do, but for now, I’m happy to just see where life takes me.”

Hannah will be sad to see Libby leave Hawthorne Lane. She imagines what it will be like walking past Lily Lane and not seeing Libby waving to her from behind the counter.

Libby promoted Erica from assistant manager to co-owner. She’ll be running the shop once Libby leaves for Maryland. Lucas earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Maryland, and Libby doesn’t plan to miss a single game. She’s thinking of opening a second Lily Lane once they get settled. It seems that Libby, too, is ready for a fresh start.

“Hannah?” Mark calls again. “Did you get lost?”

“Coming!” she replies, her hand coming to rest on top of her rounded belly. The baby she plans to name after its uncle, Sam, kicks, a flutter against her palm. It was Mark who encouraged Hannah to reconnect with Sam again, to tell him the truth about what had happened here last year. It’s all still very new, but Hannah can already picture her life a few months from now, her little family—Hannah, Mark, her old friend Sam—gathered in the yard of the house they’ve made a home on Hawthorne Lane, a new baby bundled in Hannah’s arms. And she knows that the best is yet to come.