Free The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah Page B

off her circulation. While she waited, she pulled her phone out of her handbag and deleted a dozen saved text messages which, in an ideal world, she would have liked to keep. But it was something to do. She was terrified of being unoccupied. There was no danger of that at work, or at home, where there was more than enough DIY to keep her busy. Charlie had stripped the walls and floors of her house just over a year ago and was rebuilding the rooms one by one, starting from scratch. It was a long, slow process. So far she’d done the kitchen and made a start on her bedroom. The rest of the house was plaster and floorboards. It looked abandoned, as if it was waiting for vagrants and rats to move in.
    ‘Couldn’t you have kept the old furniture until you bought new?’ her sister regularly grumbled, wriggling on a wooden kitchen chair that was understudying indefinitely for the comfortable armchair Charlie would one day buy for the lounge. Olivia was ideologically opposed to slumming it. The round contours of her figure were not suited to right angles and hard seats.
    ‘I wouldn’t have kept myself if there’d been any choice,’ Charlie had told her. ‘I’d have replaced me with someone better.’
    ‘No shortage of candidates there,’ Olivia had shot back merrily, trying to goad Charlie into sticking up for herself.
    The truth was, Charlie didn’t want to get the house finished; what would happen after that? What would be her project? Could she find anything big enough to leave no room for thinking or feeling? Old wallpaper was easy to strip down and replace with something more cheerful; despair wasn’t.
    Phyllis Kent emerged from the back office with the key in her hand. She passed it to Charlie and stood back, ready to make an infuriating comment as soon as one occurred to her. Charlie wondered if Phyllis had read about her in the papers last year. Some people had, some hadn’t. Some knew, some didn’t. Phyllis seemed the sort who might make an ill-judged remark if she did know, and she’d said nothing so far, but Charlie wasn’t going to allow herself to imagine she was in the clear. She’d done that too many times before and been floored when, almost as an afterthought, whoever she was talking to had suddenly mentioned it. It felt a bit like being shot in the back—the emotional equivalent.
    Most people Charlie knew well were understanding, non-judgemental. Every time she was told it wasn’t her fault, something inside her faded. They didn’t even think enough of her to be honest and say, ‘How the hell could you have been so stupid? ’ Charlie knew what they were all thinking: It’s too late, so we might as well be nice.
    She unlocked the box and took out the four envelopes and one loose scrap of lined paper that were inside. Two of the envelopes were addressed to Robbie Meakin, one had no name or address written on it, and a bulging one that looked as if it might burst at the seams was addressed to a Timothy Lush and had a first-class stamp on it. ‘Here’s your lady’s letter,’ said Charlie, pitying poor Mr Lush. He’d have to wade through at least seven pages of— don’t leap to premature conclusions, Charlie —aimless emotional snivelling, and try to work out what to do next. Charlie had been tempted, many times since last spring, to write a letter of exactly that sort to Simon. Thank God she’d restrained herself. Telling people how you felt was never a good idea. It was bad enough feeling it—why would you want to let it loose in the world?
    Phyllis whipped the envelope out of Charlie’s hand and dropped it in the metal tray under the counter’s glass window, as if prolonged contact with human skin might cause it to burst into flames. Charlie threw the two Meakin envelopes back into the box and unfolded the lined sheet of paper. This was also a letter to Meakin, from Dr Maurice Gidley FRS OBE, who had been out for a meal at the Bay Tree in Spilling last week and been pestered by