“It’s OK,” she soothed her. “Don’t be sad. Please.”
Her sympathy only made Harriet start to cry harder, and Cassie felt a chill of guilt that the cleaner had no support structure, and had endured her experience alone.
It took a few minutes for her sobs to die down and for her to regain enough control to speak.
She rubbed her face with the tissues, and Cassie handed her another bunch.
“Yes. OK, you’re right. I slept with him. But you’re making it sound like it was all my doing.”
She turned to Cassie and stared at her through swollen, reddened eyes.
“I promise on my life it wasn’t like that. That wasn’t what happened at all.”
“Do you want to tell me?” Cassie asked.
While Harriet was blowing her nose, Cassie brought her a glass of water from the kitchen. As she set it down on the stair beside her, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of incredulity. When she knocked at the door, she’d never imagined this would happen.
“He came on to me,” Harriet said.
Cassie felt cold at the words.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Am I sure?”
Now that she was over her tears, Harriet’s spirit seemed to be returning.
“Of course I’m sure. I know when a guy comes on to me and that’s what he did. He flirted with me for a couple of weeks. Suddenly he always seemed to be home when I was there, and then in the same room when I was there. Talking about how it was a marriage of convenience between him and his wife, and they were basically separated. I mean, it seemed true enough. She was hardly ever around.”
Listening to Harriet’s version, Cassie felt as if she’d been yanked out of reality.
How many different stories had Ryan told? It seemed he would say whatever suited his needs.
“He told me to come round for drinks on the balcony,” Harriet continued. “Then he invited me down the pub. I’ll tell you one thing, he knows how to make a girl fall for him. Those looks, that talk. We slept together a few times, once at his place, the rest at mine. He teased me for having green hair—it was pale green at the time. I told him I’d dye it pink and he dared me to. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t there for two of my afternoons. When I arrived next time, and you were there, it was like talking to a damn stranger. It was like he’d never said, “Oh, Harriet, I’m so lonely and you’re so beautiful.”
She sniffed hard.
“Then I saw the way he spoke to you and I was upset. I thought you’d stolen him.”
Cassie shook her head vehemently. She didn’t want Harriet to believe that for a moment, although she could see why she’d thought so.
“I didn’t steal him. I didn’t know about any of this. He told me on the phone that he was divorced and that’s why he needed help with the kids. I thought he was telling the truth. Why would he lie?”
She felt as if she was asking herself the helpless, unanswerable question, but at the same time she longed to find a logical explanation for Ryan’s actions, to prove him truthful despite the weight of evidence building up against him.
Harriet shrugged. “Some people are like that, I guess. They can’t help but lie.”
Cassie had never thought that there were people—ordinary people—who would create a fictitious reality for no good reason when they didn’t have to. She was battling to accept this truth.
Harriet sighed. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to hit you with my car, just to give you a fright. I was so angry when I saw you on the road, but honest, the minute I swerved I started feeling terrible, as if I’d gone too far, as if he’d made me into a bad person and someone I wasn’t.”
Cassie rubbed Harriet’s shoulders, understanding full well what that was all about.
“So anyway, you go for it, date him, do whatever, but you should know what he’s like, and what he did to me.”
“I don’t want to have anything more to do with him, or even spend another night in that house,” Cassie confessed. “Dating’s not in the cards anyway, it’s like I’m already history and nothing ever happened between us. I feel like I’ve been used, too. I feel completely messed up over all of this. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”
Harriet’s face hardened.
“Best advice I can give you? Get out of there. You don’t want to be involved in that situation. He’s a liar and a user. I’ve asked to switch shifts with one of the other cleaners, so this afternoon will be the last time I work there, and after that someone else can deal with him. I never want to walk through that door again.”
Harriet climbed to her feet.
“I’d better get on. I’m really sorry about what’s happened to you and I apologize again for swerving at you.”
As Cassie left, she called after her.
“By the way, I meant it when I said whoever messed with your car, that wasn’t me. No lies. I’d tell you if I’d done it but I didn’t. That was somebody else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
As the front door of the cozy double-story slammed behind her, Cassie felt like throwing up. Harriet’s story had exposed betrayal of the worst possible kind.
She stumbled across the road and collapsed onto a concrete drain cover. It was cold and damp, and her jeans would be wet when she got up, but she didn’t care.
For a few minutes she sat, staring blankly at the road, trying to take in what Harriet had said, and what it meant.
Slowly, logical thought returned.
Cassie supposed that Harriet might not have told the whole truth. For a start, Cassie thought she might be lying about having not tampered with her car. After all, swerving at someone was
