Her One Mistake(89)
At first Harriet would pick a bud and put it in a bud glass on the windowsill. She told Alice that sometimes they were from Grandpa’s bush and sometimes Daddy’s, but over time she couldn’t bear having anything of Brian’s in the house and stopped picking flowers from his.
It’s only a plant, she would tell herself. But it wasn’t. It was a constant reminder that he was out there watching her, and one day she feared she’d end up ripping the damned bush out of the ground.
“Do you want to take this outside?” Harriet fills a tumbler of water and hands it to Alice. She still needs to tidy the kitchen and change her clothes and lay out the new napkins with the cake she’d bought as a backup. Make it all nice.
She hasn’t spoken to Charlotte since telling her there would be no trial. By then this was no surprise, but the confirmation was still a relief. Harriet understood there was no evidence of her involvement, no proof that anyone but her father was involved, whether others believed it or not.
So she’d ended up letting him take the blame, just as he’d made her promise to if it all went wrong. And how wrong it went, she thinks, her eyes filling as they are drawn to his rosebush again.
Her dad was only in her life for six months, but he’d managed to change everything. She takes a deep breath and looks around, reminding herself as she often does that he gave her all she ever wanted. Freedom.
Over the last year Harriet has told him many times how sorry she is. She whispers it at night as she curls up in bed and the tears flow down her cheeks. She longs for one more day with him so she could relive all the magic he brought into their lives. They would build sandcastles and eat ice cream when it was cold and they would laugh until it felt greater than any pain.
Harriet presses her hand against the windowpane, covering the view of the rose. She can feel the hole in her heart stretching, tugging until she forces herself to look away. She needs to think about the day ahead. Charlotte will be here soon. Her stomach flutters and she allows herself to feel a little excited as she pulls a cloth out and begins to wipe down the kitchen.
? ? ?
CHARLOTTE SQUEEZES THE tea bag against the inside of the paper cup with a plastic spoon. Fields roll past through the train window. The carriage was empty until they’d pulled into the last station, where a handful of passengers shuffled in. Now there are at least a dozen of them, including a couple sitting at the far end of the car that keeps drawing her attention.
The girl looks barely seventeen. She’s sitting next to the window and stares glumly out of it. Her boyfriend, who is at least ten years her senior, kicks a battered purple suitcase with a restless foot. Each time his foot bangs against it the girl flinches. Behind his scruffy beard and dark eyebrows there are steely gray eyes that flick around the train as if he’s expecting or looking for trouble.
Charlotte feels the plastic spoon snap between her fingers and looks down, surprised to find she’s broken it in half. She forces herself to look away from the couple and think about what she plans to say to Harriet. There are many things she needs to get off her chest that won’t stop haunting her.
At first Charlotte was relieved when Harriet moved back to Kent. She wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder every time she went to the park. Not that she ever went to that particular one anymore. But then as the weeks passed, relief turned to an anger, which settled in her gut and began to grow. She was angry with Harriet. So full of rage.
The papers called Harriet’s story “tragic” and labeled her “brave.” Charlotte swallowed the lies she read, and all the while her rage grew and grew. What made it worse was that she couldn’t release it. Instead she had to sit back and accept she’d played a part in turning Harriet into the victim.
Some mornings Charlotte yanked back the curtains, wanting to open the windows and scream. Let the world know that it was she who should have their pity and admiration. Not Harriet. Where were the stories about Charlotte? What happened to the people who attacked her in the press? None of them retracted their slurs. No one seemed interested in what became of the friend, but then maybe she should be grateful they’d stopped talking about her. And that that awful Josh Gates’s story about Jack had never been published.
Yet staying silent is suffocating. It feels like it’s quite literally drowning her. After Harriet moved, Charlotte started imagining the life her old friend was now living: what her house is like, if Harriet’s cut her hair, if she has a circle of friends who’ve accepted what happened to her. She’s wondered about it to the extent that she actually hates Harriet for running away and setting up a new life, while Charlotte’s been sinking lower and lower into her own despair.
She can’t move past the fact that she lied to the police, but there’s also something else. And if what Alice told her is true, then Charlotte needs to know what she’s been covering up.
She sips her tea and checks her watch as they pull into another station. Hers is the next stop, and they’re due to arrive in twelve minutes. The train pulls away again and she texts Audrey to check on the children, looking up as the boyfriend at the end of the car raises his voice. He calls his girlfriend a stupid bitch and slams his fist on the table and she is crying, her shoulders heaving and tears streaming down her face in black streaks from her smudged mascara. The other passengers keep their heads down or stare out the windows, except for a lady in her eighties who watches them, shocked by their public display of anger and hysteria. Now he is in the young girl’s face, making her recoil with each word he spits.