Chapter 7 - Finding Hannah
The guest room in Brooke Hayes’s apartment smelled like cinnamon tea and clean laundry.
It was small—just a double bed, a painted dresser, and a window that looked out over the brick alleys of downtown Kingsport—but to Hannah, it might as well have been the grand ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton.
She had spent three hours in the shower.
When she finally came out, she was wearing a pair of my old sweatpants and an oversized hoodie Brooke had lent her from her nursing school days. Her hair was damp, combed straight down her back, and the hollow, wild look in her eyes had begun to settle into a deep, exhausted stillness.
She sat on the edge of the bed, her bare feet tucked under the hem of the duvet, holding a mug of hot chocolate between both hands as if she were afraid someone would snatch it from her grip if she loosened her fingers.
Brooke was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables on a wooden cutting board with a steady, comforting rhythm: *thunk, thunk, thunk.*
I sat in the wicker chair by the window, watching the rain wash down the glass.
“They wouldn't let us talk,” Hannah said. Her voice was very quiet, barely competing with the rain. “At St. Jude’s. If you spoke during meals, they made you scrub the dish room floor with a toothbrush. If you mentioned your family, they said you were 'centering your trauma' and put you on forty-eight-hour room restriction.”
I looked at her thin wrists. The skin was pale, almost translucent under the lamp light.
“How did you find my letters?” I asked.
A tiny, secret spark appeared in Hannah’s eyes. The same spark she had when we used to hide the barn kittens from our father.
“Elaine thought she burned them all,” Hannah said. “In the burn barrel behind the garage. But she was lazy, Becca. She just threw the envelopes in on top of the old newspapers and lit the kerosene. She didn't stay to watch them turn to ash.”
She took a sip of the chocolate, her eyes fixed on the steam rising from the mug.
“I went out there at two in the morning,” Hannah whispered. “With a flashlight. The edges were charred, but your handwriting was right there. *Dear Mom and Dad, I finished Basic. I’m at Aberdeen for 91B school. I’m learning how to pull diesel engines.*”
Her chin trembled.
“I took them up to my room,” she said. “I hid them inside my hollowed-out geometry textbook. Every night, after they went to sleep, I’d read them. You said you were proud. You said you had friends who didn't care who your father was or how much money Daniel had. You said... you said out there, you were just Rebecca.”
“That’s all I ever wanted to be,” I said.
“Elaine found them when she was looking for my diary,” Hannah said, her voice dropping into a flat, cold register that sounded terrifyingly like our mother’s. “She didn't even yell. She just picked up the pages, walked into the bathroom, and flushed them down the toilet one by one while I watched.”
I closed my eyes. The image burned behind my eyelids like white magnesium.
“And then she told me,” Hannah continued, “that you were dead to the family. That you had chosen the gutter, and that if I didn't want to end up like you, I would do what Daniel told me to do.”
I stood up from the wicker chair, walked across the small room, and sat down on the mattress beside my sister.
She leaned against my side, her head resting against my shoulder, just like she used to do when she was seven years old and terrified of the thunderstorms that rolled off the Clinch Mountain ridge.
“We’re leaving, Hannah,” I told her.
She looked up. “Where?”
“Fort Campbell,” I said. “Clarksville. It’s four hours west. We have a house on the post. There’s a high school right across from the main gate. A good one. With a track team and an art program that doesn't ask permission from the Mercer foundation to buy watercolor paper.”
Hannah’s breath hitched. “Can Brooke come?”
From the kitchen doorway, Brooke leaned against the casing, a wooden spoon held in her hand, her scrubs still dusted with flour.
“I already applied for the night-shift transfer to the emergency room at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital,” Brooke said, grinning through tears. “They’re paying five dollars an hour more than Kingsport, and the apartment across from the base has a pool.”
Hannah looked between the two of us.
The realization that her life was not over—that it had not ended in the third-floor dormitory of St. Jude’s—finally cracked through the stone wall she had built around herself for three years.
She dropped the mug onto the nightstand, buried her face in my lap, and wept.
Not the quiet, terrified whimpering from the school landing.
She cried with the full, racking fury of a child who had finally realized that she was safe, that the monsters had been driven into the woods, and that the morning was actually going to come.
May you like
I sat there with my hand on the back of her neck, feeling the steady, rhythmic beat of her pulse against my palm, while the rain outside washed away the last traces of limestone dust from Maple Street.
***
