“I have to go, Mom.”
“No. You can’t just go. Not after asking questions like that. What’s this al about? What’s going on?”
“I have to go. I’m sorry. I’l cal you as soon as I can.” Hannah hung up and silenced the phone, pushing it deep into her pocket.
Sean was stil waiting for her farther down the path, looking at his own phone, seemingly ful y absorbed. Could he have overheard her conversation? She didn’t think so.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
She forced a smile. “Al good.”
“Okay if I pick you up tomorrow around ten?”
“Sounds good,” she said. She’d better cal the car rental company and arrange for another car to be delivered to Yorktown. She would go with him that far, stay with him until he’d interviewed, or tried and failed to interview, Sam Fitzhugh, and then she was going to go straight to Greensvil e. Straight to Dandridge. Straight to the truth.
Hannah
FOURTEEN
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 2019
The next day Sean picked her up and they drove slowly out of Charlottesvil e. They didn’t talk much and Hannah didn’t mind the silence. She wrapped her arms around herself and suppressed a shiver.
“Cold?” Sean asked. It was warm out, at least eighty degrees.
Hannah unwrapped her arms and took her phone out.
“I’m fine.” Hannah just wanted the next steps over with. She started to review Samuel Fitzhugh’s social media activity. He wasn’t a prolific poster, more of a commenter, but there were some photographs. Enough so that she and Sean would have no trouble picking him out of the crowd. She waited until Sean stopped at a traffic light, then held up her phone so that Sean could see it. “Here,”
she said. Her screen showed a photo of Samuel, sandy blond hair a little grown out, basebal cap on backward and wearing a muscle shirt that he didn’t quite fil out. He was posing goofily with three friends who were dressed much the same.
“Which one is he?” Sean asked.
“On the far left,” Hannah said. “In the blue shirt.” Sean took a closer look, nodded.
“Anything else on there that helps us?” he asked.
“There might be. There’s a lot of chatter about tonight. There’s a house party. Not at Sam’s house, one of his friends. I can’t figure out which one, though. And no one’s giving out the address or anything.”
Sean made a face. “It doesn’t sound too promising.”
“Yeah.” Hannah thought about it for a moment, then put down her phone. She searched around in her bag for her little bag of makeup —then flipped down the passenger mirror and applied a thick layer of mascara and the slickest, reddest lipstick she owned. She pul ed her hair out of its ponytail and flipped her head upside down for a second, tousling it so that it looked messy in that just-got-out-of-bed-wanna-get-me-back-in-it kind of way.
“What are you doing?” Sean said.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m making a profile.” Hannah unbuttoned the top two buttons on her shirt, then shimmied sideways in the car, holding her phone away so that she could take a selfie, with an exaggerated pout and a peace sign. She took a second one, this time laughing, from a higher angle but making sure she caught some cleavage, then straightened back up and buttoned her shirt.
She grabbed pictures from other sites. Pictures of other people’s breakfasts, other people’s coffees and sunsets and friends. She used them al , along with the two selfies she’d just taken, and created a profile on the site used most often by Sam and his friends.
She used the laughing cleavage shot for her profile pic, then started liking and commenting on the boys’ posts. Quickly, much faster than she’d expected, she had results. Two friend requests from two of the boys, and a few likes. Hannah shook her head, smiling a little.
“Jesus. It’s almost too easy.”
Sean was shaking his head, half-smiling, but she could see that he wasn’t relaxed. Something was bothering him.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“You think it’s beneath me to use my feminine wiles?”
“Hannah, far be it from me to get between you and your feminine anything.”
“Okay, but something’s definitely on your mind.”
He sighed, gave her one of his sideways glances. “I know you lied, Hannah.” His hands clutched the steering wheel. “About your mom. There’s no cancer trial at University Hospital.”
“You checked up on me?” Hannah asked faintly. Shit. Shit shit shit. Not this. Not now.
“After what happened at Greensvil e, Camila had some crazy ideas. I thought they were out there. But . . . I cal ed the hospital.
They told me there’s no cancer trial.”
Hannah reached for words and found none. The silence went on too long.
“Maybe it’s true that your mother’s sick, I don’t know, but she’s not being treated here. You must have other reasons for transferring to UVA.”
Hannah fought the urge to tel him everything. She might have, if it had been her story to tel . If she could have trusted him. But maybe she could tel him something. Some measure of the truth. “My mother is an alcoholic,” she said flatly. “She’s been an alcoholic al of my life, since I was a very smal girl. She goes through stages where she has it together, stages where she fal s apart. It’s hard. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve taken care of her. I needed to get away. I needed to be by myself. So I took the transfer.”
Sean drew in a breath and let it out. “Is that the truth?” he asked.
“Yes.” Oh God. She’d intended to lie, to cover herself, but . . . was there some truth to what she’d just said? Had she left Orono, at least in part, because she couldn’t handle home anymore?
“Why the cancer story?”
“Because if I say cancer, people leave me alone. If I say I’ve left my alcoholic mother to fend for herself, people want to know more.
And I don’t want to talk about it.”
He looked away. “Then I’m sorry. I should have respected your privacy. I’m sorry for pushing. It was a shitty thing to do.”
Hannah nodded, swal owed her guilt, and they fel silent for a while. “I liked your mom,” she said. “She seems . . . it seems like she loves you a lot.”
“She’s pretty great,” Sean said quietly.
“My dad died too,” Hannah said. “Before I was born. I never got to meet him.”
Sean glanced at her. “That’s rough, Hannah.”
“Do you remember your dad?”
“Some. I have some real y clear, specific memories. Like, on my tenth birthday he gave me this whole talk about how doubledigit birthdays are real y important—that was a good one. The day I knocked the TV off the table and broke the screen. Man, was he pissed. I won’t forget that one in a hurry. And then other memories are a bit more confused—a kind of mishmash of lots of different days, you know, playing bal in the park down from our house, that kind of thing.” He was smiling.
“That sounds nice.” It was a while before Hannah spoke again.