Chapter 14 Charlie
CHARLIE
The knock on the door interrupts Charlie’s calculation process, but he bats away the frustration as he looks up from the spreadsheets that cover the desk in his cubbyhole of an office.
The ten-by-ten square had cost him two extra tables on the restaurant floor, but the sacrifice had been worth it, the separation giving him a much-needed place to hide—except now, it seems.
“I thought I’d find you here,” says Freya’s mother, Anita, walking in without the need of an invitation.
Charlie groans inwardly, his brain already fast-tracking its way to find an excuse to extract himself from the reason she’s here. Ever ready to trust the sense of foreboding that precedes Anita, who always seems to delight in delivering bad news.
He sighs resignedly and leans back in his chair. “What are you doing here?”
She sits down on the chair opposite him, her pungent perfume filling the tiny room with its sickly sweet scent. “I’ve just been to see Freya,” she says.
Charlie looks at her, waiting for her to expand on what that’s got to do with her turning up here.
“And I think you and I should have a chat.”
“I haven’t really got time to exchange pleasantries,” he says, unable to think of anything worse even if he did.
“I’m concerned” is all Anita says.
“About what?” he asks, wishing he didn’t have to.
“For her well-being.”
Charlie balks, unused to Freya’s mother worrying about anyone other than herself.
“She’s fine,” he says, hoping his curt tone will signal the end of the conversation.
“I don’t think so,” says Anita. “She seems…” She looks around, pretending she’s searching for the right words, but Charlie knows she would have prepared everything she’s come here to say well in advance. “I don’t know … frightened.” Her eyes snap back to him, as if expecting a reaction.
He refuses to give her one, despite his neck muscles tightening involuntarily.
“I feel like I’m watching history repeat itself,” Anita goes on. “Because it got to the same point with Pete.”
Charlie sighs, bored of Freya’s ex being brought up in every conversation he has with his mother-in-law.
“You can’t really compare,” he says. “Pete was just a fling. We’re married.”
“He wasn’t just a fling at the time,” says Anita indignantly. “He was her world, and she honestly thought they were going to be together forever. But all of a sudden—bam!” She claps her hands together. “Something happened and it was all over.”
That’ll be when he was caught having sex with someone else, Charlie wants to say, but he holds himself back, knowing that Freya hadn’t disclosed the details to her mother, for fear that she would somehow be blamed, for not being as “available” as she should have been, or for giving him too much freedom to explore other options.
Charlie pulls himself up at the reminder that Freya needs more credit than he gives her, for having been brought up by such a narcissistic bitch.
Anita tuts. “Freya didn’t know what to do with herself when they broke up. She was frantic, and I see that in her again now.”
Charlie doesn’t want to allow himself to be manipulated by Anita’s skewed perspective, but he can’t help but wonder if Freya is finding it more difficult than she’s letting on.
He’s asked a lot of her these past six months, and she’s risen to the challenge with few complaints.
But maybe it was unrealistic to expect her to have taken it all on without buckling under the weight of what she’s carrying.
That night, the move, the new job, the restaurant, the shift in their relationship …
it’s a lot, and maybe she isn’t dealing with it as well as she’s letting on. Which makes Charlie nervous.
What if she cracks under the pressure? Maybe Anita’s right. Maybe she’s at breaking point and is only a step away from buckling?
He doesn’t want to give Anita the satisfaction, but he can’t help but ask.
“In what way?”
Anita purses her lips as if wondering whether she should say what she wants to say. Charlie waits patiently, used to her making a drama out of everything.
“She seems agitated, nervous even.” She snatches a glance across the desk. “Almost as if she’s waiting to be tapped on the shoulder.”
Charlie shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly, but inside he’s anything but. He knows she’s clutching at straws—she has to be—yet it doesn’t stop his heart from beating faster than feels comfortable.
“Is everything okay between the two of you?” simpers Anita, tilting her head to the side in that patronizing way she’s perfected.
“Yes,” snaps Charlie, the lie leaving a bitter taste on his tongue.
“Mmm,” she muses. “I just wonder if she feels vulnerable, having been dragged away from everything she loves, everyone she knows.…”
“She wasn’t dragged anywhere,” says Charlie, his patience waning. “Coming here was her idea—she wanted to start afresh.”
Anita raises her eyebrows questioningly—her thin lips pulling tight, accentuating the deep lines around her mouth, brought on by five decades of smoking.
“I know you’re busy with work and everything—you’d be forgiven for taking your eye off the ball—but there’s nothing else—no one else—that she might be concerned with?”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Anita, her tone loaded as she makes a show of inspecting her false nails. “I don’t want to speak out of turn.”
Charlie looks at her through narrowed eyes, waiting for her to throw the dice in this game that they’re seemingly playing. Though which way up they’re going to land he doesn’t know.
“It’s just that she seemed so preoccupied when she was in London, and to turn up on my doorstep unannounced was so unlike her.”
“London?” he says, before he can stop himself. “When was she in London?”
Anita looks at him like the cat who got the cream, smugly relishing the power he’s just handed her. Fuck. He hates that she’s taken control of the narrative, but he has to know what she’s talking about because Freya hadn’t been back to London since they left—at least, not that he knows of.
“Last week,” shrills Anita, loving every second of his ignorance. “It was so odd because I called to tell her that Marcus Harding was out of his coma, and within two hours she was at my front door.”
Charlie’s knuckles whiten as he takes hold of the sides of his desk, his brain meeting itself coming backward at both the news and what it means. Not yet registering that the bigger question that needs answering is: What the hell was Freya doing there?
“Oh, didn’t you know?” says Anita, his shock too obvious to hide.
Charlie grits his teeth. “That’s wonderful news.”
“Isn’t it?” Anita smiles. “His wife was on the local news last night and says his memory is slowly returning. The police are going to interview him again to see if he remembers anything more about the accident.”
The air feels as if it’s being sucked out of Charlie’s lungs with every word Anita utters. But still she goes on.
“And it occurred to me that maybe that’s what Freya’s frightened of.…”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at,” says Charlie, glaring at her.
“Tell me,” she says, leaning in, “if you had an inkling about something, a steadfast suspicion that would see justice served, and help heal a family who deserved nothing less, would you share it?”
Charlie wants to throw himself across his desk and cover her mouth with his hand. He doesn’t want her to utter another sound, knowing that once her thoughts escape into the world, he’ll no longer be able to hide from them.
Is she suggesting that Freya has told her what happened?
Or, at least, alluded to it? Surely not.
They’d sworn to one another that they’d never tell anyone.
But what if Freya couldn’t hold it any longer—what if she’s already reached her breaking point?
And telling her mother—the one person who would feel compelled to do something about it—was her only way of letting the steam out from the pressure cooker she’s been trapped inside of for six months.
“You need to leave this alone,” he manages, even though his throat feels like it’s closing up.
“And allow a perpetrator to walk free?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think I can.”
Charlie feels as if he might throw up, all too aware of the lengths Anita will go to to ensure justice is served.
Her dogged determination and steadfast resilience had seen Geoffrey Wilson, Freya’s piano teacher, be convicted of indecent assault and sentenced to two years in jail.
Which, when it was his word against thirteen-year-old Freya’s was no mean feat.
“My mother may be a lot of things,” Freya had told him. “But if somebody ever does me wrong, she will fight to the death to make sure they never do it again.”
The rhythmic beating in Charlie’s chest roars in his ears as he looks at Anita. His eyes only able to focus on her fuzzy outline as she sits there, brazenly holding his future in the palm of her hand.
“You need to think about Freya, and what it will do to her.”
“Oh, she’s stronger than you think,” says Anita.
“You don’t know her like I do.”
Anita smiles. “You forget. I know her better than you could ever hope to.”