in shit you don’t understand. It’s ancient history, but not to Bull.”
“What’s ancient history? His marriage to Fae?” Hannah spun her glass, her fingertips tapping in the condensation puddles on the wood.
He knitted his brows, studied her face. “Is it possible you really have no idea? I thought you were putting on an act.”
“I assure you, I cannot act. Have no idea about what?” Hannah did her best to meet his gaze, opening her own eyes a little wider. Another flirt trick from Julia. She’d forgotten most of them, but somehow lately, she could hear Julia’s voice. Remember her sisterly advice—even the ridiculous kind.
“Ellie. Warren. Fae.” Joel circled his hand around like, You know. She did not know.
“Ellie is Warren’s daughter. Fae was her stepmother until she was ten. Warren and Fae were married. That’s all I know.” Hannah splayed her hands out like, See?
“Damn, you’re not playing me.” Joel ran a hand through his thick hair. “Okay, listen, but you didn’t hear all this from me. The night Ellie ran away—and she truly ran away, she had a bus ticket, the cops have her on camera at the station—Warren swears on his life he saw her up at Brackenhill. He’s been spouting nonsense about it ever since. I mean, he’s been a drunk for twenty years or more; it’s not credible, but . . . he did get McCarran to reopen the investigation.”
“Wait, spouting nonsense about what? What investigation?”
“Into what happened to Ellie. Warren saw Ellie at Brackenhill; he followed her up there after an argument, he says. Then she disappeared into the woods, and he says Fae followed her. He tried to chase them down, but it’s thick back there, and he got turned around. Look, he was probably drunk as a skunk.” Joel’s voice was low, and Hannah had to lean forward to hear him.
“I don’t understand, though. If she ran away, what could he possibly be saying? What are the police investigating?”
“That night he saw them? Warren is convinced that Fae killed Ellie.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Now
Huck had left eight days ago. Hannah spoke to him once briefly on the phone. He hollered in the background to someone else: a worker, perhaps. “Sorry, hon, that’s just Dave.” Like she should have known who Dave was. Hannah played along (“Oh, right, Dave! Tell him I said hello”). When they hung up, she felt no more connected to him than she’d felt before the call. They might as well have not even spoken. The exchange was perfunctory, transactional.
They’d always been a tiny bit transactional. Can you pick up Rink’s meds? Sure. Sushi tonight? Yes, the place on Circle Drive. Hannah assumed most relationships fell into this pattern. She’d always felt a streak of pride in it: Look how functional we are! Trina had done everything; Wes contributed nothing. After Wes left, after Julia disappeared, Trina fell into a state of disrepair, and Hannah filled in the gaps. Her teenage years were benchmarked by dysfunction. There was something satisfying about her and Huck’s partnership—they were a well-oiled machine. No messy emotional glitches, no meltdowns on the bathroom floor, no shattered glasses against the walls. They didn’t even squabble about housework. What she couldn’t get to Huck would do, and vice versa. If she put laundry in, he’d hear the buzzer and deftly switch it. She’d come home from grocery shopping to find him folding her shirts the exact way she liked them—which was slightly different from how he liked them, but he complied.
They would have been perfect parents.
Would have been?
The thought jarred her. The engagement ring still glinting on her finger. The scrying ring on the other hand. The wedding date not set, the wedding itself rarely discussed in detail. The idea of a wedding so attractive to both of them—she assumed, anyway—but perhaps not the actual mess of it. He’d asked her once, “How many people on your side?” And that was all it took. She’d never brought the wedding up again. He had a list. He’d made it one night over wine. Aunts and uncles, cousins and childhood neighbors turned Thanksgiving tablemates. Some of them Hannah had met, but mostly not, and Huck regaled her with stories about drunk uncles at Saint Patrick’s Day parties and an older aunt who wrapped up half-used beauty supplies at Christmas: shampoo and blue clamshell bath soaps with dried bubbles still on them (once even the curl of a black hair, and Huck and his brothers had howled for years at the “pube-soap Christmas”).