Sara Shepard - Heartless

Mrs. Hastings reached across the table and touched Spencer’s hand. “I hope it’s not a burden to hear this. I just wanted you to know the truth.”

“No,” Spencer croaked. “It explains a lot. I’m glad you told me. But why didn’t you go back to school after Melissa was old enough?”

“I just . . .” Mrs. Hastings shrugged. “We wanted you . . . and that time had passed.” She leaned forward. “Please don’t tell Melissa,” she urged. “You know how sensitive she is. She’d worry I resent her.”

Inside, Spencer felt a tiny thrill. So she was the daughter they’d planned for . . . and Melissa was the one they hadn’t.

And maybe this was even the cover-up A had been talking about, although it didn’t have anything to do with Ali, or Mrs. Hastings not liking her. But as Spencer reached for a piece of flatbread, a tiny, buried memory from the night Ali vanished twinkled in her mind.

After Ali ditched them in the barn, Spencer and the others decided to go home. Emily, Hanna, and Aria called their parents for rides, and Spencer went back into her house and up into her bedroom. The television had been on downstairs—Melissa and Ian were in the den—but her parents weren’t anywhere to be seen. That was odd, because they typically didn’t allow Spencer or Melissa to be alone with boys in the house.

Spencer had slid under her duvet, miserable at how badly the night had gone. Something woke her much later. When she stepped into the hall and peered over the railing, she saw two figures in the foyer. One was Melissa, still wearing the gray flutter-sleeve top and black silk headband she’d had on earlier. She was whispering heatedly with Mr. Hastings. Spencer couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, only that Melissa sounded angry and her father sounded defensive. At one point, Melissa let out a frenzied cry. “I can’t believe you,” she said. And then her father said something Spencer couldn’t discern. “Where’s Mom?” Melissa asked, her voice rising with hysterics. “We need to find her!” Then they hurried toward the kitchen, and Spencer shut the door quickly and scuttled back into her room.

“Spence?”

Spencer jumped. Her mother was staring at her with large, round eyes across the table. When Spencer looked down at her hands, cupped around her water glass, she realized they were trembling uncontrollably.

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Hastings asked.

Spencer opened her mouth, then shut it fast. Was that a real memory, or a dream? Had her mother been missing that night too? But it was implausible that she’d seen Ali’s true killer. If she had, she would’ve gone to the cops immediately. She wasn’t that heartless—or lawless. And what would be the point of covering up something like that?

“Where did you go just now?” Mrs. Hastings asked, her head tilted.

Spencer squeezed her softened, paraffin-soaked palms together. Since they were being honest with each other, maybe she could talk about this. “I . . . I was just thinking about the night Ali went missing,” she blurted.

Mrs. Hastings twirled the two-carat diamond stud in her right ear, letting this sink in. Then her forehead wrinkled. The lines around her mouth looked etched as though with a chisel. Her eyes darted down to her plate.

“Are you okay?” Spencer asked quickly, her heart rocketing to her throat.

Mrs. Hastings’s mouth snapped into a tight smile. “That was a terrible night, honey.” Her voice dropped an octave. “Let’s not talk about it ever again.”

And then she turned away, flagging down the waitress to take their orders. She seemed nonchalant enough as she asked for the Asian chicken salad with sesame dressing on the side, but Spencer couldn’t help but notice that her hand was clenched tightly around her knife, and her finger was slowly tracing the sharpened edge of the blade.

Hanna stood in the cafeteria at the Preserve at Addison-Stevens, a tray of baked chicken and steamed veggies in her arms. The cafeteria was a large, square room with honey-colored wood floors, small farm tables, a glossy black Steinway grand piano off to one side, and a wall of windows that looked out onto the shimmering meadow. There were textured, abstract paintings on the walls and gray velvet curtains on the windows. On a table near the back were two shiny, expensive-looking cappuccino makers, a long, stainless-steel cooler full of every kind of soda imaginable, and platters upon platters of divine-looking chocolate cakes, lemon meringue pies, and toffee-fudge brownies. Not that Hanna would be partaking in the desserts, of course. This place might have a James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, but the last thing she needed was to pack on ten pounds of fat.

Admittedly, her first day in the loony bin hadn’t been that bad. She’d spent the first hour or so staring at the plaster swirls in the ceiling of her room, ruminating on how badly her life sucked. Then a nurse had come into her room, handing out a pill like it was a Tic Tac. Turned out, it had been a Valium, which she was allowed to take whenever she wanted here.

Then she’d had an appointment with her therapist, Dr. Foster, who promised she would contact Mike and tell him that Hanna wasn’t allowed to use the phone or send e-mails except for Sunday afternoons, so he wouldn’t think she was ignoring him. Dr. Foster also said Hanna didn’t have to talk about Ali, A, or Mona in session if she didn’t want to. And finally, the therapist reiterated over and over again that none of the girls on Hanna’s floor knew who she was—most of them had been at the Preserve for so long that they’d never heard of A or Ali to begin with. “So you won’t have to think about it while you’re here,” Dr. Foster said, patting Hanna’s hand. And all that took up the entire therapy hour. Score.

Now it was mealtime. Everyone else in the girls’ wing was gathered at tables of three and four. Most patients were wearing hospital scrubs or flannel jammies, their hair mussed, their faces without makeup, their fingernails without polish. There were, however, a few tables of pretty girls in skinny jeans, long tunics, and soft cashmere sweaters, their hair shiny, their bodies toned. But no one had noticed Hanna or welcomed her to sit with them. They all seemed to look through her, as if she were just a two-dimensional image drawn on tracing paper.

As Hanna stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, she felt transported back to the Rosewood Day cafeteria on the first day of sixth grade. Sixth graders were officially part of the middle school, which meant they ate lunch with kids in seventh and eighth. Hanna had stood at the edge of the room just like this, wishing she were pretty and thin and popular enough to sit with Naomi Zeigler and Alison DiLaurentis. Then Riley Wolfe bumped Hanna’s elbow, and Hanna’s spaghetti-and-meatballs lunch splattered all over her shoes and the floor. Even today, she could still hear Naomi’s high-pitched laugh, Ali’s demure chuckle, and Riley’s apathetic and insincere “Sorry.” Hanna had run out of the cafeteria in tears.

“Excuse me?”

Hanna turned around and saw a short, dumpy girl with dull brown hair and braces. She would’ve mistaken her for a twelve-year-old except that the girl had enormous boobs. Her melon-colored hoodie stretched tight across them, making them look rather like melons themselves. With a sad twinge, Hanna thought of Mike. He’d probably make the same boobalicious remark.

“Are you new?” the girl asked. “You look kind of lost.”

“Uh, yeah.” Hanna wrinkled her nose at the sudden, grandmotherly smell of Vicks VapoRub. It seemed to be wafting from this girl’s skin.