eyes. She’d done it again.
‘I should have told you,’ Laura added dejectedly. ‘I was going to sew it back on, but …’
‘He wasn’t there,’ Sarah finished, guilt weighing heavily in her chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, not sure what else to say.
‘It’s okay. You were suspicious. I understand,’ Laura offered magnanimously, ‘especially with my mother turning up to spoil everything the way she does. God, wouldn’t she just love this.’
Sarah glanced at her, her guilt multiplying tenfold as she saw a slow tear roll down her cheek. ‘Why is she so horrible to you?’ she asked.
Laura turned to gaze out of the window. ‘Because she’s frightened,’ she said.
‘Of?’ Sarah urged her.
‘Me,’ she said simply.
Forty-Six
Sherry
‘Do you not realise she might tell him everything?’ Sherry asked irritably as she followed Grant around the stables. He’d been questioning her again, wondering why she insisted on interfering in Laura’s relationships, as if he didn’t know.
‘Tell him what?’ Grant asked patiently. ‘She doesn’t remember what happened that night. She can’t tell what she doesn’t know, can she? There’s nothing she can say that won’t sound highly implausible given her condition. The case is closed. As far as the police are concerned, Jacob went missing. You need to move on, Sherry. It’s dead and buried,’ he said, causing her heart to constrict painfully.
‘We can’t guarantee she won’t recall something,’ she retaliated, as he continued around the stables, lifting his saddle and bridle from the hooks in the tack room, refusing to acknowledge her concerns. ‘There’s always the possibility that something might trigger her memories,’ she went on. ‘That she might confide in this latest man she’s involved with. Doesn’t it worry you that she chooses to have relationships with men who have children uncannily like him? She can’t move on. She’s trying to hold onto him, don’t you see; to keep him alive? She’s reliving her life with him. She’s desperate to know what happened to him.’
Sighing, Grant turned away, carrying his riding gear across to his beloved horse, a thoroughbred Arabian – a flighty, temperamental mare. Sherry was sure he thought more of it than he did her. ‘Why can’t you just drop it?’ he asked, preparing to saddle up. ‘Leave the girl alone?’
Standing a safe distance off from the snorting beast, in case lethal hooves should fly, Sherry eyed him with frustration. ‘Do you think I don’t want to?’ she retorted. ‘Do you imagine for one second that I want to keep going over and over this? That I don’t want to bury the past and all the despicable things that went on?’
Grant didn’t react. He never did. ‘How can you be so indifferent?’ she asked him. ‘So uncaring?’
He looked at her at last, his expression one of astonished amusement. ‘Me uncaring?’
By which he meant she was. As if this cold person she’d become was who she wanted to be. As if she didn’t lie in bed night after night, riddled with guilt, haunted by what had happened. ‘I hope your fucking horse throws you,’ she hissed tearfully.
Grant sighed heavily as she walked away. ‘Sherry,’ he called after her, ‘come back.’
She kept walking.
‘Sherry … look, I’m sorry,’ he went on, his tone contrite. ‘I know you’re worried. I am too. I just think you need to stop trying to live Laura’s life for her and get on with your own.’
Sherry swiped at the tears on her cheeks. She couldn’t get on with her own life. She didn’t have one. It was all a front, a sham. A shallow existence. Better this, though, or so she’d thought, than to live a lonely existence in poverty. She’d been there once, living hand to mouth. She couldn’t go there again.
She only hoped he was right, that Laura didn’t remember and never would. She’d seen that look in her eyes again after that idiot man’s unfortunate accident, one of confused disbelief. Sherry hadn’t flinched in the face of it, though her heart had been breaking for her daughter. She couldn’t. There was simply too much for them to lose, for Laura to lose, if only she knew it. She’d hoped that in the fullness of time, her daughter would see that she’d only ever tried to do the right thing for her, that she did love and care for her, to the detriment of herself. She wasn’t getting any younger, though. No amount of Botox or beauty treatment could erase the passage of time on the inside.
She had to stop this once and for all, she realised, her