Her One Mistake(87)
I found out about the baby two weeks before the fair and, as much as I’ve tried putting the fact I’m carrying his child to the back of my mind, I knew the timing meant I had to go through with my plan. If Brian found out I was pregnant, I’d have no chance of escaping him. Especially if it’s the son he always dreamed of, the one he always hoped might turn out just like him. I shudder at the thought as Angela opens the door to the cab. I begin to climb in when I spot someone waiting by the far wall.
“Actually, can you hold on for just a moment,” I say. “There’s someone I need to speak to.”
? ? ?
CHARLOTTE’S PALE FACE is lit against the dark sky by the harsh white light floodlighting the front of the station. Underneath her eyes the skin is red and smudged with makeup. She blinks rapidly as she looks at me and then away, and neither of us knows what to say, but I know I have to find something. “I can’t begin to say how sorry I am. I should never have done what I did.”
“No,” she says plainly. “You shouldn’t.”
Angela is watching us and I angle myself so she can’t see my face. “Thank you. I didn’t deserve you coming to Cornwall. I shouldn’t have asked—” I stop, because even to me my words sound hollow.
“You should have always known I’d have done anything for you. You could have told me what was happening. I was your friend, Harriet. It’s what friends do,” she says, her voice tired.
I don’t even know what to say. She’s right.
“For the last two weeks I’ve been blamed for losing Alice,” she goes on. “I blamed myself too. Tonight I’ve had to listen to them blaming me.” She gestures toward the police station. “For hours they’ve been asking me why I didn’t know my best friend was in trouble, why I didn’t act as soon as you called me this morning, and I couldn’t tell them, could I?” She shakes her head and looks away, her eyes glistening. “This evening I still felt guilty, can you believe that? I felt guilty that I hadn’t been a good enough friend to you.”
“No,” I say, “don’t ever say that. You’ve been the best—”
“Don’t,” Charlotte stops me. “I can’t hear it. I just want to get back to my family.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, reaching out for her, but she moves her arm away.
“I can’t forgive what you’ve done, Harriet,” she says quietly.
“I understand,” I say, and I do. I truly do, but I can’t help thinking this is exactly what Brian would have wanted.
ONE YEAR LATER
Audrey pours a hefty amount of red wine into Charlotte’s glass, cradling her own. Charlotte waits, but she knows Aud has no intention of speaking first.
“I don’t know what happened.” Charlotte rubs the stem of her glass between her thumb and finger.
“This isn’t the first time,” Aud says. “You made an excuse to leave Gail’s two weeks ago and obviously didn’t want to be at book club. But tonight you drove off before you even made it through the door.” Audrey sighs, taking Charlotte’s hand. “Talk to me.”
Charlotte takes a large gulp of wine and puts the glass back down on the coffee table, too heavily. Well, Audrey, here’s the thing. I feel like I’m on the brink of a breakdown.
“There’s this black cloud hanging over me,” she says eventually. “I can’t shake it.”
“It’s been a year now.” Audrey’s tone is a little softer.
“I know, and I realize I should have moved on, but I can’t.”
Audrey looks at her quizzically. Charlotte can’t expect her to understand when she doesn’t know the truth. “You still feel responsible,” Aud says.
“I don’t.” Not for what happened to Alice, anyway.
“Then I don’t get it. You don’t like coming out anymore. I watch you on the playground and your mind’s somewhere else completely. Charlotte, look at you. You look permanently panicked. And you’ve lost weight, too,” she adds. “Too much.”
Charlotte picks her glass up, swilling the red liquid around until she almost spills some. It’s true, a lot of her clothes hang off her now.
“Talk to me,” Audrey says again.
“You know when everyone found out Alice had been taken by her grandfather?” Charlotte says. “Within twenty-four hours every one of the people I’d felt had shunned me turned up on my doorstep, each of them telling me how wonderful it was that Alice had been found and how relieved I must be.”
“But you were.”
“Of course I was relieved she was safe, but only days before, they’d all distanced themselves from me, pulled their kids away from mine. Then they all got a neat resolution, which meant they could brush over what had happened and pretend like it never did. I felt like they were forgiving me.”
“You’re losing me.” Aud shakes her head.
“Their forgiveness meant they thought I was guilty in the first place. And they’d been happy to victimize my children because of it too.”
Audrey looks down at her glass but doesn’t answer. They both know there’s truth in what Charlotte says.
“None of them apologized because they didn’t want to acknowledge that they’d acted horribly. And I never confronted them. I just let it go.” Charlotte shrugs. “The elephant in the room is always there, though. The other day Gail started talking about that TV drama, The Missing, and I was genuinely interested, but then she just suddenly stopped, looked at me, and it felt like the air had frozen. Someone changed the subject and we were all talking about hairdressers or some other crap and I thought, it’s always going to be like this, isn’t it?”