Hanna skirted around Brooke, marched out the door, and gunned her Prius as fast as it would go out of the Beatties’ driveway. The last thing she wanted was to hear another word about Brooke’s tanning goals, Jell-O shots, and thinly veiled double entendres of how Brooke was going to get Lucas into bed.
Her cell phone rang just as she turned at the end of Lucas’s street. Lucas’s name flashed on the screen. Hanna considered not answering, then sighed, picked up, and said hello.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Lucas blurted. “I promise.”
Hanna didn’t answer, instead squeezing the steering wheel so hard she was sure she was giving her palms blisters.
“My dad just told me that the hotel we’re staying at has Wi-Fi. I’ll Skype you every day and send tons of photos and tell you how much I adore you on Facebook every few hours.”
“How about every hour on the hour?” If Lucas was constantly in touch with her, he couldn’t get into that much trouble, could he? “And promise to get me a present—something good. And don’t you dare look at any boobs on that nude beach.”
When they hung up a few minutes later, she felt a little better. Hanna wound through the streets of Rosewood, the only sound in the car the whooshing noise of the heater. As she passed the busy shopping district, she noticed two headlights pull up behind her. They followed her as she drove by the school, the lit-up windows of Otto, the fancy Italian restaurant, and Fresh Fields grocery. With every turn, the car kept pace. She glanced at the dark figure behind the wheel in the rearview mirror, her heart starting to beat faster. Was she being followed? What if it was Ian—had he broken out of prison? She pulled over at an intersection and waited. The driver passed her by without slowing, and Hanna exhaled in relief.
Hanna looked at the street sign and realized where she’d stopped. This was Mona’s old street—and Ali’s.
Some of the houses on the block were already decorated for the holidays. The Hastingses’ estate had twinkling lights that traced the perimeter of the roof. Jenna Cavanaugh’s house had solemn candles in the windows. Ali’s old house, which a new family lived in now, had a glowing wreath on the door. The Ali Shrine, which friends and strangers alike had set up shortly after Ali’s body had been found, blazed at the curb. It was anyone’s guess who kept those votive candles lit.
The Vanderwaals’ property was dark. Hanna could just make out the long, five-car garage at the corner of the lot, the one she and Mona had climbed on top of and written HM + MV = BBBBBFF in big white letters on the roof. “Promise me we’ll never be anything but besties,” Mona had said after they’d finished and were washing the white paint off their hands with the garden hose. “I promise,” Hanna had said. And she’d believed Mona with all her heart.
Now Hanna wanted to fire-bomb the garage. Or climb up there and leave a bouquet of flowers in Mona’s memory. Her emotions veered so wildly from second to second it was hard to know what she felt.
And then, unbidden, the memory of the car that had roared toward Hanna in the parking lot two months ago flashed in her mind. Hanna had tried to run, but it had come at her too quickly. She remembered the sharp, binding terror she’d felt when she knew the car was going to hit her—that Mona was going to hit her.
“Don’t think about it,” Hanna whispered to herself.
Hanna drove slowly the rest of the way home, taking deep, cleansing breaths. After gunning the car up her family’s driveway, she nearly crashed into a line of vehicles she didn’t recognize. There had to be about fifteen sedans, SUVs, and crossovers parked in the circular drive. Then she noticed something blinking by the garage. Christmas lights. And was that a glow-in-the-dark Santa and an inflatable gingerbread man in the front yard?
She took tentative steps toward the house. Dot, wearing some kind of bizarre headpiece, yipped at her feet when she walked inside. Wait. Were those reindeer antlers? Hanna scooped him up and stared at the two plush stalks on his head. Each was tipped with a tiny jingle bell.
“Who did this to you?” Hanna whispered, ripping them off. Dot just licked her face.
She looked around the living room and gasped. Holly leaves snaked around the banister. A mechanical Mrs. Claus waved from the console table that had once held Hanna’s mother’s austere ceramic vases. A tall, tinsel-laden tree stood in the corner, and the fireplace, which Hanna couldn’t remember the family ever using, was ablaze. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” played on the stereo at maximum volume, and the whole house smelled like honey-glazed ham.