Page 22 of Safe Hands

I did that, Lauren realised.

The panic that had sent her tearing across town had transformed into something heavier but more manageable. Responsibility, maybe. Or simply the knowledge that she didn’t fall apart every time things got hard.

“I need to fix things with Carly,” Lauren said. The words came carefully now, not frantically. “The question is how.”

Paige tilted her head. “Apologise?”

“Already tried. That’s the easy part.”

An apology was just words, and she always had plenty of those. But Lauren had spent years trying to forgive herself and clearly hadn’t managed it. How could she expect Carly to forgive her in a few short days?

8

Carly

Strategic. If that was Carly’s role, why did it always feel like she was the one doing the grunt work?

She bent down, a black sack spread over her hand, and picked up a poo the size of a molehill. After wrapping the plastic and tying the handles, she paused, wondering if this was a double-bagger. Whatever Samantha had been feeding Berkeley, his digestive system was protesting.

“We need to sort you out,” Carly told him, discarding the bag in a bin and finally drawing a full breath.

It was a crisp autumn day, orange leaves littering the path while children in puffer jackets shrieked on the monkey bars. The two loudest were her nieces. Samantha had sent them along for the walk to avoid taking them to see their grandpa, and Carly hadn’t argued, mostly because she didn’t want to go either.

Seeing her father—once a giant, now withering in his chair—opened a grief so total that Carly had learned to route around it, the way you’d take a convoy the long way to avoid a collapsed bridge. Today she didn’t have the fuel for the detour.

Her phone vibrated. She swiped to accept.

“You can bring them home now,” Samantha said. A clicking noise suggested she’d just kicked off her shoes, and the huff that followed told Carly to brace.

“They’re still playing,” Carly replied, waving to the girls as she walked another lap of the play area. “We’ll head back in a while.”

“But I thought you had to be somewhere.”

“I do, but the match doesn’t start until two. There’s time.”

Another huff. “So I’ve rushed home for nothing?”

“I didn’t ask you to rush.”

Stony silence.

“Well, I have,” Samantha said eventually. “Dad might have liked me to stay for lunch with him, but I didn’t.”

Carly pinched the bridge of her nose.

“How was he?”

“Pig-headed. I tried to talk to him about the dog, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“What about Berkeley?”

“Finding him a suitable home when Dad moves into care.”

Carly stopped walking. “We are not rehoming him.”

“So you keep saying, but I don’t see you coming up with an alternative. I don’t have time to cook for him like Dad did. I’ve moved him to tinned food from the supermarket, but it’s costing a fortune.”

“That explains the state of his stomach.” Before Samantha could fire back, Carly added, “I’m working on it. All of it. But I need longer than a week. I’ve only got one pair of hands.”