Her One Mistake(14)

“She was so caring about the children,” I tell the detective. “She gave me time. We talked and I realized we had things in common.”

“Like what?” she asks. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this.

“At first it was our pasts,” I say. “We spoke about—” I stop abruptly. I was about to say we’d spoken about our fathers, that we had shared confidences. Even though the meeting had started off about Jack, I’d somehow veered into the course of my own childhood and shared with Harriet the story of my father. Well, some of it. But I’d told her more than I had anyone else. I told her how he’d walked out on us when I was still a child.

But then Harriet told me hers had died when she was five and I immediately felt a pang of guilt, because surely that was so much worse than what I went through?

“It was years ago,” she’d said as she pressed her hand into mine. “Please don’t feel bad.”

But despite her smile and the way she looked at me so assuredly, I had seen a glimmer of tears in her eyes and knew she was just trying to reassure me I hadn’t upset her. Deep down I could sense she was still hurting at the loss and, even then, right at the start of our friendship, I’d felt guilty.

“Time is a great healer, isn’t it?” she’d said. “Don’t they say that?”

“They do, but I’m not entirely sure I agree,” I’d mumbled.

“No.” She’d smiled. “I’m not sure I do either.”

It was only after the briefest of pauses that I’d found myself asking her to join me and my mum friends for coffee the following week. Harriet looked taken aback and I’d assumed she would turn me down.

But instead she had thanked me and told me she’d love to, and while I smiled at her and said that was wonderful, I immediately wondered if I’d been too hasty with my invite. The other mums wouldn’t like that they couldn’t talk freely about the school, and Harriet would be my responsibility, and I didn’t think I needed any more of those.

When I told Audrey what I’d done, she’d raised an eyebrow.

“Give her a chance. I think you’ll like her,” I’d said. “Besides, she doesn’t know anyone else in the area.”

Harriet didn’t have any other friends, I’d realized early on. Tom had called her another of my pet projects, which had disproportionately annoyed me, but there was something about Harriet that made me want to take her under my wing. I’d decided I could help her. First step—she needed to meet more people.

“Harriet had only moved to Dorset a few months earlier,” I tell Detective Rawlings. “I wanted her to feel welcome.”

“And how did she settle into your group?” the detective asks.

“Well.” I pause. “She didn’t, really. Whenever she came along she always looked so uncomfortable that in the end I stopped inviting her. I didn’t want her to feel awkward when it obviously wasn’t her thing.”

Detective Rawlings’s eyebrows flicker upward and I fidget on my hard seat. “I knew she didn’t want to be there,” I say defensively. “I knew she wasn’t that keen on some of them.”

“But you carried on your friendship with Harriet?”

“Yes, although not so much at the start. I still chatted to her whenever I saw her, but it wasn’t until she had Alice and I had Evie that we started meeting up regularly. By then all my other friends had school-age children and were doing different things with their days. Harriet and I kept each other company.”

Harriet had stopped me from going crazy. She became a friend at a time when I needed someone like her more than ever. When everyone else I knew could go back to work or to the gym or spend hours in coffee shops without feeling drained from a night of no sleep, and who very quickly forgot what it was like to have a newborn.

“I wasn’t happy after Evie was born, and Harriet was a good listener,” I say. “On top of that, my marriage was struggling and I used to offload to her.” Much more so than Audrey back then, but Harriet had always been so eager to help.

“Would you consider yourself best friends?”

“She’s one of my best friends, yes,” I say, thinking of Aud and how the two of them couldn’t be more different. But don’t friends play different roles in our lives?

“How would Harriet answer that?” she asks.

Harriet would say I’m her only friend.

“She’d say the same,” I tell her.

I imagine what Rawlings must be thinking, but she doesn’t ask the question that hangs on the edge of her lips.

What would Harriet say now?





BEFORE


HARRIET


Brian and Officer Shaw’s murmured voices blended into the background as Harriet stared at her backyard through the kitchen window. She’d always loved the space. It was nothing like Charlotte’s—it didn’t have room for a wooden climbing frame and double swings, or a fourteen-foot trampoline and a playhouse. But she’d only ever known a life of living in flats and making do with strips of balconies.

The backyard was the only thing Harriet had liked about the house when they’d first moved in. Five years ago, when Brian had pulled up outside the thin semi he’d bought for them, her heart had plummeted. Their move to Dorset had been sold to her as her dream—a house by the sea. Harriet had imagined opening the windows in the morning and smelling the sea air, hearing the squawk of seagulls circling overhead, maybe even glimpsing the water from a bedroom window.