Her One Mistake(84)

I tell him the truth about my mother’s lie, that my husband believed my father was dead, and that I never could have contradicted Brian when he told the police this because I was so frightened about what he might do. And when the detective wants to know if I’ve seen my dad since he left, in the last thirty-four years, I admit he turned up at my door six months ago.

Lowry raises an eyebrow and settles back in his seat, letting my admission linger between us. It isn’t the answer he’d expected. He is either excited or nervous by the turn this is taking—he certainly didn’t think I would so readily admit I’d seen him again, but I have no choice. Alice will tell them she knows him.

“Harriet,” he says, pressing closer to the microphone. “Did you know your father had taken your daughter from the fair thirteen days ago?”

I close my eyes and bow my head, taking a breath, slowly and deliberately.

“Harriet?”

My father made me promise him I’d deny my involvement. Betraying him feels so much more unforgivable now. “No. I didn’t know anything about it,” I say, Charlotte’s words reverberating in my head: How could I live with myself if I didn’t lie?

Detective Lowry crosses his arms and leans back in his chair, cocking his head to one side as his eyes bore into me.

In the twenty-minute journey from the beach to the police station, I’d stitched together a fragile story made from fragments of truths, creating another version of reality that I needed to believe. I may have learned to make up stories when I was younger, but it was thanks to Brian that I’d acquired the gullibility to believe anything.

I take another sip of water, swallowing it loudly, and remind the detective what my husband was like and how scared I was of how he’d react.

“Right. Your husband,” he says flatly. “Who no one else knew was abusive.”

I ignore his tone. “My father was the first person I confided in.”

The detective glances at my wrist. I’ve been rubbing it again, and a wide red circle now bands my arm. “It wasn’t physical.” I stop rubbing and gesture to my wrist. “Though he did grab me tonight. But no, what he did throughout our marriage felt much worse,” I say.

“So what did your father say when you told him?”

I tell Lowry my dad tried persuading me to leave Brian, but that Brian had made it impossible. And then I tell him the story my dad came up with when he said he couldn’t see me anymore. That he’d told me he moved to France and he was sorry he couldn’t do more to help. I tell Detective Lowry that I hadn’t seen him again until tonight.

Lowry is still incredulous that I mentioned none of this to the police two weeks ago. That surely I would have suspected my father could have taken Alice.

“Of course I wish I had now,” I say. “I haven’t seen my daughter in two weeks.” Tears trickle down my cheeks at the thought of Alice and how desperately I want to be with her again. I wipe them away with the sleeve of my T-shirt. I would change everything if I knew I could save my dad.

“Are you sure there’s no news?” I ask him again. “Did they find Brian?”

? ? ?

DETECTIVE RAWLINGS FOLDS her hands, one on top of the other, on the table in front of her. Her shoulders are taut, her forehead now has a permanent crease along the length of it. She can’t hide her frustration as much as she tries.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that you didn’t know anything about Brian.”

“Christ!” Charlotte falls back into her chair and looks away from the detective.

“What’s the matter, Charlotte?” Rawlings’s interest is piqued.

“I just can’t believe we are still going over this same thing. I didn’t know,” she says through gritted teeth. “Harriet never told me about her husband’s abuse. I didn’t know Harriet as well as I thought I did, I realize that now,” she snaps. “I don’t know why you’re trying to make me feel worse about it than I already do.”

Somewhere along the line, tiredness has bled into exhaustion. But Charlotte’s heart is thumping, adrenaline is feeding her veins, and the more Detective Rawlings accuses her, the more Charlotte wants to shout, “Just bring it on.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” the detective says, her face still void of emotion. “I just want to get to the truth.”

“I’ve been telling you the truth,” she cries, feeling the blood rush to the surface of her skin. “And maybe I should have looked harder, but the fact is—” She falters. “The fact is, if you don’t want someone to know, they won’t.”

The detective pulls back, her eyebrows pinched, seemingly amused by Charlotte’s outburst.

Charlotte’s chair screeches back across the hard floor as she stands up. She rips open her cardigan and pulls up her T-shirt with one hand, lowering the waistband of her jeans with the other. “This,” she says, pointing to the puckered red scar on the side of her stomach, “is what I didn’t want anyone to know.”

She lets her T-shirt fall and uses her hand to wipe the tears across her face. Not one person knew the truth: that one night her dad’s temper led to him ripping the hot iron off the ironing board, out of the socket, catching Charlotte as he swung it around in anger. It might have been an accident, but still, she never wanted anyone to know the truth.