When Harriet Came Home Read Online Free Page B

Adam’s number from directory assistance. She stood in the hospital forecourt, gazing unseeing at tubs of marigolds while she screwed up her courage and eventually dialled the number.
    “Adam Blackstone.” He answered on the second ring.
    Thrown by his quick response, she flapped her lips as all her rehearsed greetings flew from her brain. “Um…hi, Adam, it’s Harriet here…er, Harriet Brown.”
    Damn, why did she sound so hesitant?
    There was a weighty pause before he spoke. “I hear your father’s doing well.”
    “Yes, yes, he is.” She wondered how he knew this.
    “I rang the hospital this morning,” he continued in a neutral tone, answering her unspoken question. He stopped, and she could hear some banging noises in the background. She tried to picture him wielding a hammer with a couple of nails held between his lips. What exactly was he doing at Cindy’s place?
    “Harriet? Is there some reason you rang?” A thread of impatience entered his voice. She imagined him frowning down at his work boots.
    “Well, yes, there is. The thing is, ah, you and I have never really talked—”
    “We talked yesterday.”
    “That—that wasn’t really a talk.” Her fingers grew damp as she clamped them round her mobile phone.
    “I don’t need to talk.”
    Sheesh, how rude and arrogant he sounded. Her back stiffened. She snatched off a marigold leaf and crushed it between her fingers, inhaling its pungent scent as she drew in a deep breath. “I think we do. You can’t tell me that, after all that’s happened, you don’t have anything to say to me, anything at all?”
    He drew in a harsh breath that sounded like a growl to her. “Trust me, Harriet. You really don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say to you,” he said, his teeth grinding like pebbles.
    Her lower lip shook, but she made herself continue. “Listen, I know you hate me, but maybe it’s time to let bygones be bygones?”
    “I don’t hate you,” he said in the iciest tone she’d ever heard. “To hate you, I’d have to know you personally, and I don’t know you from a bar of soap. So let’s keep it that way, huh?”
    She trembled, her skin prickling as humiliation grazed over her, but this time a welcome wave of anger washed the embarrassment away. “You haven’t changed much really,” she retorted unsteadily. “You’re still so full of yourself, still full of your own self-importance.”
    She heard him drag in another ragged breath and pictured the lines deepening around his mouth. “Is this your way of apologising? Frankly, my dear, it sucks.”
    And he hung up on her.
    Numbly she stared at the phone. The marigolds mocked her with their bright orange heads. Whatever brief moment of camaraderie she and Adam had once shared was obviously gone—they could barely hold an ordinary, civilised conversation. Her father had thought one simple phone call could clear up a decade’s worth of bad blood, but he was wrong. She and Adam couldn’t even be in the same room together, let alone call a truce.
    The back of her throat smarted. She picked a marigold and buried her nose in it. She didn’t want all these people wandering in and out of the hospital to see how much Adam had hurt her. But hadn’t she said some hurtful things to him too? Things he didn’t deserve? She groaned. Maybe she should call him back…but he’d probably already blocked her number on his mobile phone.
    She discarded the marigold and trudged back inside. So much for making her father happy. How was she going to tell him about the phone call? She walked in to find her mother at his bedside, her makeup restored and only a little overdone. Her father looked drained, but when he spotted her, he broke into a tired grin.
    “See? Didn’t I tell you you’d feel better after talking to him?” He turned to Sharon. “Harriet’s smoothing things over between her and Adam. I’ll feel so much better now when he comes to visit me later today.”
    Harriet collapsed into a