Just Jennifer

What Happened to Hannah by Mary Kay McComas (William Morrow, February 2012)


Who among us hasn’t wanted to escape a situation in our life at one time or another? There are even those of us who wanted to escape our life entirely. Hannah Benson left her small Virginia town as a teenager and made a new life for herself, never calling to learn what happened to her mother or sister, or handsome Grady Steadman, knowing that the only way to save herself was to completely cut herself off. Now, twenty years later, the owner of a successful insurance business in Maryland, the call that she has always feared comes, but with news she never expected. Her sister Ruth has been dead for several years, Grady informs her, and her mother has just died this past weekend and now Hannah must return to Clearfield to take custody of the fifteen-year-old niece she never knew she had. Having no interest in returning to Clearfield or raising a young woman she never knew existed, Hannah girds herself and returns to a place of terrible memories, secrets and guilt. As isolated as she has made herself over the years and as tough a shell as she has developed, once back among familiar sights and sounds, memories flood back to Hannah, some elicit pleasant memories, much to her surprise, other memories are not so pleasant. As Hannah slowly works her way in Anna’s life, she begins to create new memoires with her niece, all the while conscious of the secrets she is keeping and the consequences should they come to light, and all the while trying to keep her distance from Grady for whom her attraction never died, and the feeling seems mutual.

Mary Kay McComas explores the things we leave behind and what never leaves us; what we leave unfinished and what finally undoes us. Hannah’s memories are vivid, but not everything is how we remember it and we don’t always know the entire story behind something. Everyone who ever wondered what they have left behind and how they can make reparations will find something familiar in Hannah as she gets not a second chance, but a chance for things to be as they should be.