What Happened to Hannah

What Happened to Hannah

He should have called her three years ago. Now he had no choice.
Opening the center drawer of the old oak desk in his office, Grady removed a folded piece of yellow notepaper and spread it out flat in front of him. He rubbed his damp palms on his khaki pants and sighed out loud.
The creases in the note were pliant and soft from frequent folding, the writing a bit faded. A name and two sets of numbers, nothing more. But how many times had he slipped them from the drawer, dialed all but the last digit and hung up? She was twenty years and a phone call away, yet there were moments when he could feel her standing next to him, catch the scent of her hair, hear an echo of her voice. How pathetic is that?
He blew out another long breath and picked up the receiver, trying to ignore the knot in his stomach. If he thought about her long enough, a familiar guilt would bore holes through the memory; anger would trickle in, pool, and eventually congeal into a sense of hopelessness and failure. Mostly he tried not to think about her—but he couldn’t help being curious.
Leather creaked as he pushed himself straighter in the chair. He should make the call before he remembered too much, before he lost the tenuous hold on his professionalism. Changing his mind was no longer an option.
He dialed the numbers.
He stared at the phone and grappled with his doubts. Who was she now? Still the strong, brave, serious Hannah, so beautiful that a teenage boy would risk his friends and reputation—everything— to be with her? Or was she someone else entirely?
He didn’t know if she’d married or if she had children. Both her business in Baltimore and the private number were listed under her name, but that didn’t mean anything except that she had her own life and her own business.
Well, part of a business.
Insurance, for crissake.
He smiled and let loose a soft private chuckle. Insurance. The night she disappeared he’d feared for her life, prayed desperate prayers that she’d run away. He’d worried himself sick. Then slowly and gradually, as months piled up to years and no word of her returned to Clearfield one way or the other, he still refused to believe what everyone else assumed to be true. She simply couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be. Bright summer days were still glorious, snowy nights with full moons were still magic, and rainbows still brought her to mind. He had fantasies of her popping up on television or a movie screen or in some magazine showing off her chateau and rich, handsome husband—Clearfield and Grady Steadman an empty lapse in her memory.
But never, not in his wildest imaginings or his simplest dreams, had he pictured her selling life insurance to Main Street, America.
It made perfect sense, of course, and he wasn’t disappointed when he found out where she was and what she’d been doing.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HANNAH. Copyright © 2012 by Mary Kay McComas. Reprinted courtesy of William Morrow Paperbacks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.