Page 42 of Forgive Not Forget
Rebecca hung her head. “Sorry, Kat. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Katherine sighed. “I’m sorry, Anna, I… don’t want children. It was hard enough for me to open my heart to you. I just can’t go through it all again.”
Without time to properly process Katherine’s explanation, Anna went with the response required of anyone in this situation. “It’s okay. I understand that you want to protect yourself.” This wasn’t the time to allow her disappointment to overwhelm her, as much as it was trying. Katherine was all that mattered at this moment.
Katherine stepped off the stool. “I’m going for a lie-down. Sorry, I hadn’t got around to making dinner. There is plenty of food in the fridge. I’m sure you can fix yourselves something.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Anna asked, unsure if Katherine should really be alone at this time.
“No, I just need to shut my eyes,” Katherine replied, squeezing Anna’s hand as she passed.
Once Katherine was out of sight, Anna found herself under Rebecca’s scorn.
“Well, thanks for the support there,” she said. “Really helpful.”
“What?” Anna was taken aback by her tone.
Rebecca got up and examined the contents of the fridge. “This is a really good opportunity for her; you should have been encouraging her, not holding her back.”
“She doesn’t want to go; I’m not going to force her.”
“We can’t just let her do what she wants; we have to push her towards what’s best for her. Do you think if I’d sat back the past few years and let her do what she wanted, she’d be here? She’d be fucking dead.”
Anna throat tightened at Rebecca’s words.
“She would have been able to deal with this better if she’d been following the rules and looking after herself, but no, she exhausts herself at that bloody abbey instead.” Rebecca threw out a dramatic arm in the opposite direction to where the abbey stood in relation to the house.
Anna thought it best not to correct her and sat back as a packet of tomatoes skidded past her on the work surface, followed by a cucumber. She quickly lifted the glass it was heading towards, allowing it to pass freely underneath.
“She is quite clearly your problem now; she’s stopped listening to me.”
Problem.The word cut through Anna. Katherine wasn’t and never would be a problem to her. She watched in silence as Rebecca made herself a cheese-and-salad sandwich. Was this a little glimpse of barrister Rebecca, bullish and scary? If it was, she certainly wouldn’t wish to oppose her in a courtroom.
“I’ll eat this in my room,” Rebecca said, cutting her sandwich in half with a bread knife and letting it carelessly fall onto the work surface with a thud.
So much for a fun and relaxing weekend.
CHAPTER17
Katherine woke with a start the next morning. Fragments of the previous evening’s conversations flashed in her head, and she desperately tried to piece them back together into something coherent. As she lifted her head from the pillow to check the time on her bedside clock, she was surprised to find her head didn’t react badly. No doubt thanks to Anna’s insistence that she eat a sandwich, drink a pint of water, and take a couple of painkillers, all before she’d shoved her into the shower, helped her into her pyjamas, and put her to bed. She hadn’t even said anything about children or the restorative justice programme when she’d held her and kissed her head as she fell asleep.
They had both cleared the weekend for Rebecca’s visit, and with no plans for the day, Katherine decided not to wake Anna just yet. She slipped gently from the bed, donned her warm, fluffy dressing gown, and headed downstairs.
“You’re leaving?” Katherine said with false surprise as she noticed Rebecca with her suitcase in the hallway. She hadn’t expected her to stay; it would have been too awkward following the previous evening’s exchanges.
“Yes, I must get back to London. Something has come up at work. Sorry.”
Katherine knew Rebecca well enough to know when she was lying. She also knew that Rebecca would be aware that she knew she was lying. They went through the motions anyway for the sake of politeness.
“I’ll call you sometime.”
Katherine nodded, not wanting to feed into the false niceties for fear they would never end. She had nothing to say, no words of regret or apology to issue, all she wanted now was to move past last night and the letter. Her only regret was having fallen out about it, when really, Rebecca should have been more supportive of her decision as Anna had been.
Rebecca opened the front door and slipped away without even so much as a look back.
Now she had another problem to add to the knot in her stomach: her broken relationship with her best friend. How she would resolve that one was a problem for another day. After Rebecca had some time to cool down, she hoped she would be back on the phone, checking in on her.
As she entered the kitchen, she noticed the letter was still on the work surface. She filed it where it belonged, in the bin. Its arrival had knocked her for six. Until that point, she really felt that she had a grasp on the day, rather than it having a grasp on her. Would she ever truly be able to escape her past?
