Free Unforgotten by Clare Francis

you ?’
    She wasn’t convinced.
    ‘What’s wrong with that?’
    ‘It sounds a bit . . . I don’t know, as though he’d won a marathon or something.’
    ‘But he has, hasn’t he? Well, not won exactly, but on the way to winning.’
    ‘Mmm.’
    ‘What about . . . How’s things? With you all the way, love Mum and Dad ?’
    She gave her wide smile. ‘Perfect!’ She dug her mobile phone out of her bag and held it up. ‘Shall I go for it then?’
    Since Lizzie was a master of texting and Hugh was still struggling with the basics of abbreviation, he waved her on enthusiastically.
    ‘If you could just keep an eye on the sauce . . .’
    The sauce contained meat, onion, and tomato, to which he added random quantities of herbs and chopped garlic, though from the smell he suspected there was quite a bit of garlic in there already. Garlic was meant to be good for colds, he vaguely remembered from one of Isabel’s strictures, its bug-defying properties enhanced, he supposed, by its ability to keep people at a distance.
    Lizzie declared, ‘There! Done.’
    She took charge of the sauce again while Hugh began to make the salad dressing, which was always his department.
    ‘I was thinking,’ Lizzie said, ‘that Charlie should have a counsellor in the holidays, someone fairly local.’
    ‘You don’t think he’ll manage without?’
    ‘Oh, I’m sure he will. But there’s no harm in knowing he has support close at hand if he wants it. A sort of safety net.’
    Lizzie often floated ideas like this, variations on the theme of how best to support Charlie. In her volunteer work at the Citizens Advice she helped people tackle a wide range of problems, from debts and benefit claims to housing and legal disputes. She was trained to cover every angle, though when it came to Charlie Hugh suspected that her industriousness owed as much to the need to feel useful as to any practical help she might be able to give.
    Hugh said, ‘But Charlie would have to decide, wouldn’t he? Whether he needed someone. And who to go to.’
    She poured steaming pasta into a colander. ‘Of course. But I thought we could ask around. Find a name or two.’
    ‘Okay . . .’
    Catching the hesitation in his voice, misunderstanding the reason, she said, ‘Oh, don’t think I’m losing faith in him, Hugh. I’m not. Far from it. No, in fact—’ She paused, as if about to say more than she’d meant to. ‘I’m actually starting to believe he’s going to be all right. I mean, really all right. I’ve never dared think it before. Not after all the disappointments. But now . . . well, he’s been sounding so good on the phone, hasn’t he? So together. It’s as if he’s finally got the message that life’s far more wonderful when he’s not stoned or high all the time. That he can get through the dark times okay with the help of NA and all the rest of it. Oh, I know it’s tempting fate, Hugh. I know .’ She clutched a hand to her head in a gesture of foolishness. ‘But I can’t help it.’
    Hugh smiled, both to reassure her that the idea wasn’t so foolish and to conceal the fact that in recent weeks his thoughts had been running in rather a different direction. It seemed to him that the odds of someone as fragile as Charlie beating his addiction first time round weren’t too good, that it would be sensible to prepare for the possibility that he would have to go back into rehab at least once, maybe twice, in the course of his recovery. This thought had seemed rather disloyal at first, but as he took the new rules on board and began to absolve himself of responsibility for Charlie’s addictions, to ‘release with love’ as the rehab centre put it, he began to accept the thought for what it was, not a matter of guilt but of guarding against disappointment.
    ‘Go for it!’ he declared.
    ‘You don’t think it’s unlucky?’
    ‘Totally not.’
    ‘Totally not.’ She laughed. ‘You sound like Lou.’
    ‘Do I?’ The thought didn’t