Her One Mistake(35)

“This is really not nice, Mummy,” Molly told me, pushing her plate across the table.

“It’s ’sgusting,” Evie added.

“I know it is,” I sighed. “Don’t eat it. I’ll put a pizza in the oven.” I swept up their plates and tipped the food into the trash, trying hard not to acknowledge that everything I did was screaming out failure.

With my back to the children, I tore into a pizza box and was only half listening when Molly said, “Mummy, Sophie said something horrible today.”

“Did she, darling, what was that?” I traced my finger over the back of the box until I found the oven temperature.

“She said her mummy said she wasn’t surprised you weren’t watching Alice.”

I spun around, attempting to put the pizza on the counter, ignoring it when I missed and it dropped onto the floor. “What did you say?”

“And she also said she wouldn’t trust you to watch the cat. I told Sophie we don’t even have a cat and they don’t either, but she said I was being stupid and that’s not what she meant. What did she mean, Mummy?”

“Nothing.” I forced a smile. “It sounds like Sophie’s just being silly.”

“Sophie said that meant she won’t be able to come here to play on her own again.”

My fingers felt tingly. It spread quickly into my arms and down my legs. Please tell me Karen didn’t really say this, a small voice whispered inside me. Karen would call me up after a weekend to tell me she’d had another hellish couple of days because her mother-in-law had popped in again, uninvited. We’d laugh about it until we had tears rolling down our faces, because she always made her stories so amusing.

But that wasn’t the kind of thing a six-year-old would make up.

I picked the pizza off the floor, checked it wasn’t covered in dust, and put it in the oven. “I’m sure there’s a mix-up,” I said, smiling at Molly. “I’ll speak to Karen and sort it out.”

“I want Sophie to come to tea again,” Molly said, hanging her head so I couldn’t see her eyes.

“Of course she’ll come again,” I said, the smile still plastered across my face. “Now you’ve got ten minutes to go play and I’ll call you back when dinner’s ready,” I said, my voice far too high-pitched. “Go on,” I urged, practically pushing her out of the room.

My hands shook as they reached for the island to steady myself as I sat on a stool. I’d been doing fine hiding away, cleaning and scrubbing and doing mindless chores. One stupid remark and I was falling apart again.

Karen had sent me flowers on Monday with a card that said she was thinking of me. They were on the windowsill, tulips, in a variety of colors because she knows I like them.

I reached for my cell, my finger hovering over it. I wanted to hear Audrey tell me I was being stupid, that no one was talking about me. I wanted her to say that Karen would have likely said something else instead and Sophie misconstrued it and it was all a misunderstanding. I wanted to laugh and put the phone down with relief that my friends weren’t talking about me behind my back.

But on Wednesdays Aud went to rugby with her boys, so I pressed another button and waited for the dial tone. I’d promised I wouldn’t do this, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey,” Tom said when he picked up. “Everything okay?”

“No.”

“Charlotte, what’s happened? Is it Alice?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“You’re crying. Tell me what it is.” So I told him what Molly had said.

“Oh, Charlotte.”

The day we separated I swore I wouldn’t rush back to Tom when things got hard. “You make your bed, you lie in it,” my mother had said when I told her we were splitting up. “Your father left and tried coming back once, and I was stupid enough to let him. And you know what happened. Besides, the kids won’t thank you if you change your mind.”

But then again, my mother had never lost someone else’s child.

“Call Karen,” Tom said.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can, she’s your friend.”

“And say what? ‘Do you not trust me anymore?’?”

“Ask her what she said.”

“Tom, it’s not that simple. What if she tells me she did say it? What if she says she means it?” I cried.

I knew I shouldn’t have called him. There was no way I could ask Karen what she’d said. I’d sooner let the thoughts eat me up than confront her.

I stared at my phone, wondering what I should do. My cell no longer felt like a lifeline between me and my friends. The initial flurry of messages I’d received in the aftermath of the fair had reduced dramatically. In fact, it was pinging with alerts much less frequently than it had before the weekend, and its silence was unsettling.

I clicked on my group texts again, something I’d been regularly doing in the last few days, but the last message remained fixedly on one that had been sent the day before the fair. I scrolled up and down the various groups: Molly’s class, Jack’s class, book club . . . there were always messages waiting for me to read. Not a day passed without someone asking about homework or a uniform or setting up a new group for a night out.