Don't Let Me Go by Susan Lewis Page A

didn’t really want me? Don’t worry, I can answer that for you. You were bringing up somebody else’s children; that’s what you were doing. You let Rick and Shelley take the place of me and my brother, because it was easier to do that than to face up to what had happened to us.’
    Anna’s face had turned deathly pale. ‘If that’s what you’re telling yourself . . .’
    ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’
    Anna simply stared down at her hands.
    ‘You can’t, can you, because I’m right. You blocked us out of your mind like we didn’t exist.’
    ‘Charlotte, stop, please.’
    ‘The truth is hard, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yes it is, but the way you’re telling it . . .’
    ‘What other way is there?’
    Anna met her gaze. ‘We’ve been through it, but if you need to go through it again . . .’
    Charlotte shook her head. ‘No, no I don’t,’ she said bleakly. Why do I keep feeling the need to punish her ? she was asking herself desperately. Hasn’t she suffered enough? Haven’t we both? She loves me, I know she does, but every time I feel her coming close I just want to push her away.
    ‘I’ve known Rick and Shelley since they were ten and eight,’ Anna said softly, ‘so I won’t apologise for loving them, but they’ve never taken the place of you and Hugo. You’re a mother yourself now, so surely you understand that no one will ever be able to do that.’
    Inexplicably angry that she’d brought Chloe into this, Charlotte was about to respond with words she knew would hurt when the phone started to ring. Avoiding her mother’s eyes she went to it, and kept her back turned as she said, ‘Hello?’
    ‘Hi babe, it’s me,’ Shelley told her. ‘I think it’s all proving a bit much for our little angel with all these tourists and strangers about. She wants her mummy . . .’
    ‘Tell her I’m on my way,’ Charlotte interrupted, already reaching for her keys. ‘I have to go,’ she said to her mother as she rang off.
    Anna nodded and got to her feet. ‘Please will you consider coming to talk to someone with me?’ she asked as she stepped outside and waited for Charlotte to close the door.
    Charlotte put up her hood and started towards the footbridge. Since the awful turmoil of emotions where her mother was concerned was impossible to fathom on her own, maybe she should agree to some counselling. Provided all they discussed was what had happened in the past, and didn’t venture forward to today, where would be the harm? For her there was probably nothing to fear and everything to gain; for her mother, who’d been hospitalised for almost a year following the brutal attack that had robbed her of the rest of her family, it would be an excruciating experience. And yet she was prepared to go through it in order to make things right between them.
    Charlotte simply couldn’t let her. It would be cruel and selfish of her even to consider it. So no, somehow she was going to make herself let go of the resentment, or whatever was driving this wedge between them, and ensure her mother never had to live through the sheer hell of that time again.
    The Stone Store, along with the mission house, was Kerikeri’s main tourist attraction, sitting in small grandeur on the edge of town between the river basin and Hongi Hika Recreation Reserve. To Charlotte it looked rather like a child’s drawing of a house with two windows either side of a central front door, three windows upstairs, a red tiled roof and tall brick chimney. It was held to be the region’s oldest building, constructed in the early eighteen hundreds by a Maori workforce to hold mission supplies and wheat for the settlers. Today it was a thriving gift shop selling everything from T-shirts, to jewellery, to Kiwiana-inspired homewares on the ground floor, while the upper level was reserved for offices, storerooms and the occasional guided tour of old artefacts.
    Leaving her car next to the river Charlotte splashed across the road through the rain,