Her One Mistake(25)
Harriet pushed herself up and stared at her husband.
“Oh, Harriet.” Brian closed his eyes and took a deep breath, carefully trying not to sigh out loud as he exhaled. “Your medication. The tablets the doctor gave you two weeks ago. I had a horrible feeling you’d stopped. Please tell me you haven’t?”
“Brian, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any medication.”
“Okay, okay,” he said calmly, holding his hands in the air as if he didn’t want a fight. “Don’t worry about it now. I’m sure it’s not important.”
“Of course it’s not important,” she said, “because there isn’t any medication to take.”
Brian smiled patiently. “We don’t have to think about it tonight. It just worries me that you think you’d told me your plans and you clearly hadn’t. But like you said, it doesn’t matter right now, not with everything else going on. We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He stood up and ran his hands down his shirt. “You need to sleep.” He walked out of the room, leaving the light on, and was down the stairs before she could say any more.
CHARLOTTE
One whole night passed and the following morning I spoke to Captain Hayes, who told me what I feared—that there was still no news.
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can tell you, Charlotte,” he said.
I pictured him and his team standing around their whiteboard, rubbing their chins, glancing at each other in the hope there was something they had missed. Surely the child couldn’t have vanished without anyone seeing anything, they must have said. I wondered if they knew more than they were telling me, or were at least suspecting it. There had to be stats about these kinds of things, probabilities to determine what had most likely happened. Did they think Alice was already dead?
But he told me there were still no leads yet and couldn’t even reassure me they were inching toward finding her.
The day before, Audrey had patiently listened as I clawed at the empty space between last seeing Alice and realizing she wasn’t there. I hoped that by dissecting it enough times something would come to me. If Aud went home and told her husband she couldn’t bear to hear any more, then she didn’t let on.
Karen and Gail had both called to see if there was anything they could do. Many friends had texted messages of support, a few asking if there was any news, and even mums I barely knew from Molly’s and Jack’s classes had found ways to tell me they were sorry about what had happened.
As much as I needed their support and was initially relieved that I wasn’t being judged, I began to begrudge relaying the story just to feed their curiosities with firsthand details. Each time I closed the door or hung up the phone I felt as if someone had taken away another piece of me.
On Sunday morning a neighbor had loitered on my doorstep, telling me, “I can’t even imagine what I’d do in that situation.”
I tried to remain patient as I nodded along with her.
“Still, I suppose you have to be thankful it wasn’t your own child.”
I looked at her in disbelief. “What?”
“I mean, it’s awful, obviously, but losing your own child—well, isn’t that worse?”
“No, it’s not worse,” I’d cried. “How can anything be worse than what’s happened?”
“Oh no, I don’t mean it isn’t horrendous,” she’d blustered. “I just think if it was one of yours, then . . .” she trailed off, looking desperately over my shoulder. “Where are your lovely ones, anyway?”
“Thank you for coming by,” I said. “But I really need to get back in.” I closed the door on her and pressed my back against it, shutting my eyes and silently screaming. I’d thanked her, for God’s sake. What was wrong with me? Was I so afraid of pushing people away that I was letting them eject their unwanted thoughts onto me? Was I scared of what they would say about me if I didn’t?
I was tired. Exhausted. I should never have opened the door. I’d barely slept, and when I had fallen into a confused mess of dreams, I was woken that morning at 6 a.m. with a piercing scream. I flung myself out of bed and raced into Molly’s room where, the night before, Tom had laid mattresses on the floor for Jack and Evie to sleep on.
When I’d gotten home from Harriet’s house I’d looked in on my sleeping children, my heart filled with love and grief.
“Thank you, Tom,” I’d whispered.
“For what?”
“I don’t know, just being here. Looking after them.”
“Of course I’m going to. I’m here for all of you,” he told me. “Anyway, they wanted to be together. Evie said she was scared and I found Jack hovering on the landing not knowing what to do with himself, so I told him to go in with the girls. By the way, he could do with some new pajamas. The ones he’s in are skimming the top of his ankles.”
How Tom thought pajamas were a priority right now was beyond me, but I told myself to let it go.
Evie was still screaming when I crawled onto her mattress and pulled her in for a hug. “What is it, Evie?” I whispered. “Mummy’s here, what’s happened? Did you have a nasty dream?”
“A bad man was coming to get me,” she sobbed. “I was scared.”