Despite Daniel Clarke not turning up for his appointment, Carla’s had a full roster of counselling appointments in her diary.
She accepted her pupil clients from a pool of six primaries and one comprehensive, all of them part of the Cumber Meadows family of schools for whom she worked.
Unless a child missed their session, like Daniel had that morning, she rarely had a spare session. She’d had more than enough to keep her busy during the day but Daniel’s face loomed in her mind throughout all of her appointments.
Daniel’s teacher, Mrs Martin, hadn’t seemed overly concerned about his absence and so Carla kept telling herself neither should she be. But all day there had been a niggle at the back of her mind; it persisted even when she arrived home following the weekly staff meeting at just after seven.
She reached into the fridge for a bottle of Sauvignon and her mind raced over a multitude of possibilities of what might be happening in Daniel’s life and why he hadn’t come into school today.
Halfway down the glass, her worries about him began to fade and a new, far more dangerous, thought took its place. A very insistent thought.
‘You promised, no more,’ she hissed out loud to herself, taking another deep slug of wine.
She had tried so hard to fight the urge and it had worked for the last few weeks.
Right up until she’d gone rummaging in the bathroom drawer this morning for a nail file and found one of Mark’s cufflinks zipped up in an old cosmetics case.
It was a silver cufflink with a solitaire diamond, one of his favourites. It had somehow survived her culling of anything that was remotely Mark when she moved to her new flat in Nottingham.
She slammed the drawer shut and left the cufflink where it was. But by then her resolve had all but disappeared into the big black hole that yawned inside her and the stirrings started with a vengeance.
She made a cup of tea but left it to go cold. She poured another glass of wine before flicking through around a hundred crappy TV channels to find there was absolutely nothing on that appealed to her.
She pottered around in the kitchen until she couldn’t find the strength to fight it any more, at which point she walked into her bedroom and began to get ready.
She’d already decided. She would wear the white dress tonight.