CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BONUS STORY – A NEW YORK CHRISTMAS FAIRY TALE
Excerpt from HOW TO KEEP A SECRET
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
