Her One Mistake(7)

Once she had cooled down, Harriet grabbed her phone and tapped the button to light up the screen. When nothing happened, she pressed the side button to turn it on, but the screen remained black.

“Come on,” she muttered, her stomach clenching by reflex. She pressed it again and again, but nothing came on. The phone must have run out of battery, but she didn’t know how. She’d plugged it in last night as she always did when she went to bed. Harriet remembered doing so because she knew she’d need it today more than ever.

Maybe she had forgotten.

No, she definitely didn’t forget. She’d made a point of charging it, just before making a cup of tea to take to bed. She’d remembered because she’d checked it again on her way out of the kitchen. Yet somehow the phone was dead.

Harriet threw it back into her bag. Now she had no idea what was going on at the fair and no one had any way of telling her. And suddenly the stupidity of the phone’s lack of battery made her want to burst into tears.

She gulped back a sob. It pained her to be away from Alice. It made her heart quite literally burn, but no one understood that. So Harriet had learned to play down how much she wanted to hold on to her daughter, how she hated the thought of letting her out of her sight. She saw the way Charlotte’s friends glanced at each other when she’d admitted she’d never been away from Brian or Alice overnight.

“She’d cope without you,” Charlotte would say. “Doesn’t Brian want you all to himself for the odd night?” Harriet tried imagining what Brian would say if she ever suggested it. He’d probably be thrilled at the idea.

“Or leave her with Brian and come away with the girls instead?” she’d persisted.

She couldn’t see herself doing either, so she mostly played down how she felt because she despised the fact she was like this in the first place. No one knew what it took to leave Alice with Charlotte today. But Charlotte had been thrilled she had asked her, even though Harriet didn’t have to tell her there was no one else to ask.

“You have to let them go one day,” a woman in a shop had said to her once. “One day they grow their wings and just fly away. Like a butterfly,” she added, flapping her arms in the air. Harriet had resisted the urge to slap them back down.

Alice would want to fly away one day, just like she had. Harriet’s own mum had held on to her, too much so, and Harriet was well aware how destructive it could be. She’d promised herself not to be like that with her own children and yet here she was. Somewhere along the line she had become the mother she never wanted to be.

She should forget the phone and go back into the room and suffer through the rest of the course. It didn’t matter, she told her reflection. It was only another—she checked her watch—two hours at most, and she’d be home at four thirty as planned.

Or she could slip away like the other girl had.

Harriet tapped her fingers against the sink. She really should be able to make simple decisions.





CHARLOTTE


As I peered through the mesh window of the Jungle Run, all I saw were screaming children tumbling over each other, barely realizing they were stepping on others in their excitement. Alice could be crouching in a corner and most of the kids wouldn’t give her a second glance. I had to go on it myself—I couldn’t rely on Jack to search for her properly.

“Come on, girls,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Let’s go see where Alice has gone.” I grabbed the girls’ hands and as we ran to the back of the Jungle Run, it crossed my mind I wouldn’t have been worried if it were any of my children. They were prone to hiding from me or wandering off. But Alice? I couldn’t imagine her doing either. There was something so fragile about her that wasn’t like any other child I knew. And there was something so horrific about losing someone else’s child.

Five feet from the back of the run was the fence that separated the field from the parkland, and in the distance a line of trees partially hid the golf course beyond. I slipped off my shoes and, holding them in one hand, crawled through the Jungle Run, both girls close at my heels.

I called Alice’s name as we clambered over ramps and crawled through tunnels, looking at every child we passed, hoping to see a flash of her pink frilly skirt.

“Where could she have gone?” I called out to Jack, who was waiting at the end. He shrugged in response as I inelegantly swung a leg over the final slide and pushed myself down and climbed off. At the bottom I held my hands out to Evie who was giggling behind me, lost in a bubble of excitement that I had crawled through with her.

“God, this is ridiculous.” I looked around, slipping my shoes back on and turning to the children. “Did she say anything about wanting to go anywhere else? Did she mention the magician, maybe?” I hadn’t seen her come into the tent, but she could have wandered off in the wrong direction and gotten lost. “Surely I would have seen her,” I murmured to no one in particular.

“Molly, did you actually see her get on this thing?” I asked, my voice rising an octave as I gestured behind us at the inflatable.

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Well.” She paused. “I think she came on after me.”

“But you don’t know for sure?” I said, trying my hardest not to shout.

Molly shook her head. I went over to the woman who had taken my money and was now talking to another mum about the cake stall. “A little girl came on this with my children,” I interrupted. “About ten minutes ago now, but there’s no sign of her.”