THIS WASN’T HOW a date was supposed to end.
If she’d known she was going to have to climb out of the window of the ladies’ room, she wouldn’t have chosen tonight to wear insanely high heels. Why hadn’t she spent more time learning to balance before leaving her apartment?
She’d never been a high heel sort of person, which was exactly why she was now wearing a pair of skyscraper stilettos. Another thing ticked off the list she’d made of Things Harriet Knight Wouldn’t Normally Do.
It was an embarrassingly long list, compiled one lonely October night when she’d realized that the reason she was sitting in the apartment on her own, talking to the animals she fostered, was that she lived her life safely cocooned inside her comfort zone. At this rate she was going to die alone, surrounded by a hundred dogs and cats.
Here lies Harriet, who knew a lot about hair balls, but not a whole lot about the other kind.
A life of sin would have been more exciting, but she’d picked up the wrong rule book when she was born. As a child she’d learned how to hide. How to make herself small, if not exactly invisible. Ever since then she’d trodden the safest path, and she’d done it while wearing sensible shoes. Plenty of people, including her twin sister and her brother, would say she had good reason for that. Whatever reasons lay in her past, she lived a small life and she was uncomfortably aware that she kept it that way through choice.
The F word loomed big in her world.
Not the curse. She wasn’t the sort of person who cursed. For her, the F word was Fear.
Fear of humiliation, fear of failing, fear of what other people thought of her, and all those fears originated from fear of her father.
She was tired of the F word.
She didn’t want to live life alone, which was why she’d decided that for Christmas she was giving herself a new gift.
Courage.
She didn’t want to look back on her life in fifty years’ time and wonder about the things she might have done had she been braver. She didn’t want to feel regret. During a happy Thanksgiving spent with Daniel and his soon-to-be wife, Molly, she’d distilled her fear list to a challenge a day.
Challenge Harriet.
She was going on a quest to find the confidence that eluded her and if she couldn’t find it then she’d fake it.
For the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she would do one thing every day that scared her, or at least made her uncomfortable. It had to be something that made her think I don’t want to do that.
For one month, she would make a point of doing the opposite of what she would usually do.
A month of putting herself through her own kind of hell.
She was going to emerge from the challenge a new, improved version of herself. Stronger. Bolder. More confident. More—everything.
Which was why she was now hanging out of a bathroom window being supported by her new best friend Natalie. Luckily for her, the restaurant wasn’t on the roof terrace.
“Take your shoes off,” Natalie advised. “I’ll drop them down to you.”
“They’ll impale me or knock me unconscious. It might be safer to keep them on my feet, Natalie.” There were days when she questioned the benefits of being sensible, but right now she wasn’t sure if it stopped her having fun or if it kept her alive.
“Call me Nat. If I’m helping you escape, we might as well drop the formalities. And you can’t keep those shoes on your feet. You’ll injure yourself when you land. And give me your purse.”
Harriet clung to it. This was New York City. She would no more hand her purse to a stranger than she would walk naked through Central Park. It went against every instinct she had. She was the type of person who looked twice before she crossed the road, who checked the lock on her door before she went to sleep. She wasn’t a risk-taker.
Which was exactly why she should do it.
Forcing down the side of her that wanted to clutch the purse to her chest and never let it go, she thrust it at Nat. “Take it. And drop it down to me.” She eased one leg out of the window, ignoring the voice of anxiety that rang loud in her head. What if she didn’t? What if she ran off with it? Used all her credit cards? Stole her identity?
If Nat wanted to steal her identity, she was welcome to it. She was more than ready to be someone else. Particularly after the evening she’d just had.
Being herself wasn’t working out so well.
Through the open window she could hear the roar of traffic, the cacophony of horns, the squealing of brakes, the background rumble that was New York City. Harriet had lived here all her life. She knew virtually every street and every building. Manhattan was as familiar to her as her own living room, if considerably larger.
Nat took her shoes from her. “Try not to rip your coat. Great coat, by the way. Love the color, Harriet.”
“The coat is new. I bought it especially for this date because I had high hopes. Which proves that an optimistic nature can be a disadvantage.”
“I think it’s lovely to be optimistic. Optimists are like Christmas lights. They brighten everything around them. Are you really a twin? That’s very cool.”
Today’s challenge had been Don’t be reserved with strangers. She was fine when she got to know someone, but often she didn’t even make it past those first excruciatingly awkward stages. She was determined to change that.
Given that she and Natalie had met precisely thirty minutes earlier when she’d served her a delicious-looking shrimp salad, she was satisfied she’d made at least some progress. She hadn’t clammed up or responded in monosyllables as she frequently did with people she didn’t know. Most important of all she hadn’t stammered, which she took as evidence that she’d finally learned to control the speech fluency issues that had blighted her life until her twenties. It had been years now since she’d stumbled her way through a sentence and even stressful situations didn’t seem to trigger it, so there was no excuse for being so cautious with strangers.
All in all, a good result. And part of that was down to the support of her sister.
“It is cool being a twin. Very cool.”
Nat gave a wistful sigh. “She’s your best friend, right? You share everything? Confidences. Shoes…”
“Most things.” The truth was that, until recently, she’d been the one to do most of the sharing. Fliss found it hard to open up, even to Harriet, but lately she’d been trying hard to change.
And Harriet was trying to change too. She’d told her twin she didn’t need protecting, and now she had to prove it to herself.
Being a twin had many advantages, but one of the disadvantages was that it made you lazy. Or maybe complacent would be a better word. She’d never had to worry too much about navigating the stormy waters of the friendship pool because her best friend had always been right there by her side. Whatever life had thrown at them, and it had thrown plenty, she and Fliss had been a unit. Other people had good friendships but nothing, nothing, came close to the wonder of having a twin.
When it came to sisters, she’d won the lottery.
Nat tucked Harriet’s purse under her arm. “So you share an apartment?”
“We did. Not anymore.” Harriet wondered how it was some people could talk and talk without stopping. How long before the man sitting inside the restaurant came looking for her? “She’s living in the Hamptons now.” Not a million miles away, but it might as well have been a million miles. “She fell in love.”
“Great for her I guess,