Guildford, four months earlier
Charlie’s phone rang. It was Oliver.
“Just checking in,” he said, clearing his croaky throat.
Every time Charlie answered the phone and heard Oliver’s voice, a shadow of what she had felt that day in the Brecon Beacons would move through her.Fearne calling, her phone had said.
She had known somebody was dead, or dying—she had seen the medics from the air ambulance unloading the stretcher as she reached for the phone on the car seat. There had been an unspeakable, sickening moment of suspension as it rang. The truth hadn’t quite been true yet, at least not for Charlie. In that instant, she’d thought,Thank God it wasn’t Fearne.
But the panicked voice on the other end of the line had been Oliver’s. He had used Fearne’s phone—in the tangle of their crash among the trees, it was the only one that he could find.
Oliver had lived.
And Fearne was gone.
Her dearest friend, that effervescent bubble of a human being, who had been her sister, who had taught her what it felt like to be loved. She was dead, and Charlie woke up every morning thinking the knowledge of it might be the end of her, too.
“Charlie?” Oliver said now, his voice still scratchy. “Are you OK?”
Charlie was standing in the middle of Fearne’s flat. She was clearing the place out. Fearne’s family lived in Cornwall and had left shortly after the funeral; they had each chosen sentimental items, but Charlie had insisted that she would take on the burden of clearing the apartment for them. Bri was on her way over to help soon. She hadn’t known Fearne like Charlie had—they’d never quite gelled. Both such strong personalities, perhaps, that a room couldn’t hold the two of them at once. But Brianna was a person who showed support by showing up, and Charlie couldn’t seem to shake her off at the moment.
“I’m fine,” Charlie said, staring down at all of Fearne’s pots and pans. The woman never cooked—why had she owned so many saucepans? Charlie sipped her thermos of coffee and rubbed at her blurry eyes. “I should be the one checking on you. How’s your arm?”
He’d fractured a bone in the crash; his arm was in a sling, and there was something schoolboyish about it, this strapping man with his arm in its little bandage hammock.
“It’s fine. It’s whatever. I don’t deserve looking after.”
She frowned. “That’s crazy, Oliver, no.”
“It should have been me,” Oliver whispered.
“Oliver…”
Every time he said this, her stomach swooped with guilt. Did he know what she’d thought? Was that moment written on her, the split second in which she’d wanted him dead?
“It was my fault,” Oliver said, his voice thick with tears. “It was my fault she died.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said forcefully into the phone, using her other hand to sift through saucepan lids.
Oliver could not seem to hear this enough, and his absolute conviction that somehow he could have saved Fearne sometimes rubbed off on Charlie. She would find herself thinking perhapsshewas to blame. She’d been reading Berty’s texts when Fearne had crashed. Sometimes she thought that was simply bad karma—she had let her ex in and was being punished. Sometimes she imagined that she’d missed something important on that hillside, something that could have saved Fearne. She could have called the air ambulance instead of Oliver; perhaps he could have used his hands to stabilize Fearne’s spine, and then she would not have died.You killed Fearne, she would think to herself.You basically killed her yourself.
These sorts of extreme thoughts were not new to Charlie. They sidled into her brain and took up residence now and then.You’re a piece of shit, her inner voice would say out of nowhere, often at three in the morning, when her defenses were at their weakest.Everyone will see it eventually, and they’ll all leave you. It’s what you deserve.
The thoughts had worsened since Fearne’s death. Sometimes they sounded like Berty:There’s something very wrong with you, she’d think, and she would almost hear his voice telling her so in the dark.
People who met Charlie would never, ever expect that she sometimes wondered such things. She seemed bubbly and fun. Obliging. A bit of a loose cannon, a bit scatty, kind of high-intensity, but certainly notmad. And Charlie felt sure that only a mad person, or a very bad person, could think the thoughts she did in the middle of the night, so every morning she forcibly forgot them, brushing them away as she combed her hair and styled her fringe. By the time she had her morning coffee, she was Charlie Jones again: sweet, fun and perfectly normal.
—
Brianna finally arrived at Fearne’s flat two hours late, a tornado with bin bags and cleaning products. She looked Charlie up and down in Fearne’s hallway.
“I knew you wouldn’t be looking after yourself.”
“Hi, Bri,” Charlie said wearily.
“I don’t know if you just don’t want me in your life at the moment, or whatever, but you’ve dodged way too many of my calls over the last six months,” Brianna said grimly, as she pulled Charlie into a fierce hug. “And I am not a person who can handle being ignored. I’m leaving the assistant director in charge for this, and he couldn’t find his way out of a wet paper bag, so you better actually talk to me or I’ll have ruined Friday’s episode ofEastside Closefor nothing.”
Brianna pushed past Charlie and began to sort Fearne’s belongings into piles. Charlie winced every time she touched something.
