Friend Request(17)
It’s an impulse she’s familiar with, having lived with it all these years. She first felt it that night, all those years ago, and it has returned at intervals ever since. What would life have been like if she’d made a different choice then, not just for her, but for everyone around her? It’s been hardest for her family. Things have never been the same for them. They’ve done their best to support her, to be there, but they didn’t really understand. How could they?
She looks down at the water again as it flows beneath her, away from her, her thoughts returning as they always do to that other time and place; that other choice, its implications still reverberating through her life.
What she wishes more than anything is that she could make things right; rebalance the scales. The world was knocked out of kilter that night. If only she could find a way to set it back on its proper axis. Maybe then she would be able to get on with the rest of her life. To live it fully, engage with the world, instead of existing in this shadowy half-life, where no one knows who she really is.
She releases her grip on the railings and slowly walks away, leaving the swirling water behind her. Not this time, she thinks. Not this time.
Chapter 8
2016
It happens again on Monday morning, three days after my visit to Sophie’s flat and exactly one week since the original friend request. Outside it’s one of those sunny autumn days where you feel summer might not be over after all. Light streams through the French windows, warming the surface of the kitchen table where I am struggling to concentrate on work. I’m already late in delivering two proposals for potential new clients, and I’m falling behind on a project for Rosemary as well. I check Facebook constantly, dreading the moment. I’ve been praying that it was a one-off, an ill-judged joke by someone going to the reunion. With every day that passes, the tiny seed of hope that I’ll never hear from her again has been sprouting.
When I get the notification that there is a Facebook message from Maria Weston, I can hardly get my hands to work fast enough, my fingers scrabbling desperately over the keys in my haste to get to the message.
Run as fast as you like, Louise. You’ll never escape from me. Every wound leaves a scar. Just ask Esther Harcourt.
I sit for a moment or two, heart racing, reading the message over and over as if that will yield some further clue as to who is doing this, and why. Run as fast as you like. There was someone following me that night. I knew it.
Ask Esther Harcourt. I saw Esther once in town, after it happened. She averted her eyes as if my guilt might somehow rub off on her, as if she could catch my shame like it was a contagious airborne disease. She didn’t even know the whole truth – if she had, she would have done more than look away.
She was the only person that Maria talked to in those last months before the leavers’ party. There are spaces, huge gaps, in what I know about Maria. Esther might be able to fill them in. I’ve spent the weekend poring over every detail of my meeting with Sophie, and the thought of speaking to someone who genuinely cared about Maria is strangely comforting.
I type her name into the search box, but she’s not on Facebook. I quash the terrible teenage part of my brain that immediately concludes that she doesn’t have any friends. Many people are not on Facebook for a variety of excellent reasons. Once I have exhausted that avenue, I try simply googling her, which throws up a number of results. LinkedIn is the top one, and it’s her. She is a solicitor, and still living in Norfolk. Her profile picture reveals that she has aged well; in fact, she looks about a million times better than she ever did at school. The bottle tops have been replaced by a sleek pair of angular designer frames and what on the teenage Esther was an unruly mass of bushy mousy hair is now a thick, glossy, chestnut mane.
She is a partner in the wills and probate department at her firm, one of the big ones in Norwich. It seems she is a proper high-flier, speaks at conferences, writes papers, the kind that probably gets invited back to school to give inspirational talks. I thought when I won that interior design award recently, and was featured in the Sharne Bay Journal, that they might invite me back to speak, but I never heard anything.
Now I know where Esther works I could call or email her, but I cannot shake the memory of our eyes meeting all those years ago, and how she turned her face away. A mad idea occurs to me and I pick up the phone. Two minutes later Serena Cooke has an appointment with Ms Harcourt to make a will. They’d taken my details and tried to fob me off with someone else but I insisted. Normally I would have had to wait, but she has had a last-minute cancellation for tomorrow morning. She’ll probably recognise me straight away but at least she won’t have had any time to prepare, and can’t refuse to see me.
The next morning we’re up early. Henry always goes to the school’s breakfast club on a Tuesday anyway so I can work, but today I’m taking him a bit earlier than usual. He sits at the kitchen table in his pyjamas, spooning cereal into his mouth, bleary-eyed and red-cheeked, still carrying the warmth of his bed with him. I lean down to kiss him as I pass, mentally listing the things I need to remember like a mantra: book bag, lunch box, water bottle, reading book, school-trip letter, fabric samples, email Rosemary.
‘Mummy?’ Henry says, between spoonfuls.
‘Yes,’ I say, distracted and still swooping around gathering everything we both need for the day.
‘At school yesterday, Jasper and Dylan wouldn’t play with me.’