Page 11 of The Friend Request

‘Extremely strange,’ he says. ‘But good strange. I think.’

I want to agree, but I don’t, because agreeing feels like crossing a line I’ve already crossed by being here in the first place. So I just nod and drink more wine and ask him what he’s been doing for the last two decades as if it’s a normal question you can answer over bread and olive oil.

He tells me. Bits of it anyway. He moved around after school – London for a while, then up north, then abroad for a few years doing something with conservation that he glosses over as though it’s not interesting, though it obviously is. He came back to the area about eighteen months ago. He lives alone. He doesn’t say why, and I don’t ask.

I tell him about the design work, about going freelance, about the book covers. He asks questions that make me realise he’s actually listening – questions about the process, about the clients, about whether I still draw the way I used to – and I find myself talking more than I’ve talked about my work in months. Alex never asks about the covers. He sees them on my monitor and says, ‘Looks good,’ and moves on to whatever he actually wants to talk about, which is usually Olivia’s school or the gas bill, or something one of the partners said at work.

I catch myself. I shouldn’t be comparing them.

‘Do you remember Mr Fenton?’ Ross says.

I nearly choke on my wine. ‘Oh, God. Mr Fenton.’

‘And the time he fell asleep during his own lesson and Jake Osborne drew a moustache on the whiteboard behind him.’

‘And he woke up and didn’t notice for twenty minutes, and nobody told him.’

‘Melanie was crying with laughter. Actually crying. Tears running down her face.’

‘She always cried when she laughed. Do you remember at the Christmas concert when⁠—?’

‘When Danny Healey’s voice broke halfway through “Silent Night”?’

‘And Melanie laughed so hard she had to leave the hall.’

We’re both laughing now. Laughter that comes from somewhere deep and makes your ribs ache. The tension drains out of my shoulders, the knot in my stomach loosens, and for a few minutes it’s just easy. Sitting here with Ross is easy in a way that almost nothing in my life is easy right now, because he knew me before any of this – before Alex, before Olivia, before the mortgage and the school run and the slow, grinding business of becoming an adult who has forgotten what she actually wants.

He knew me when I was just Kim – three years of me, fourteen to seventeen. The girl in the library with the book and the burning face and the world shrunk to the size of a single room.

The food arrives. I’ve ordered pasta, which I don’t remember choosing, and Ross has something with fish. We eat and talk, and the conversation moves between past and present – school, teachers, people we both knew, what happened to them, whether the old building is still standing, and then somehow we’re talking about music, and films, and a band I haven’t thought about since I was sixteen, and he pulls out his phone to show me something and our heads are close together over the screen and I can smell him – clean, warm, faintly woody – and my chest tightens.

I sit back.

‘More wine?’ he asks.

‘I shouldn’t.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

I pause. Then I nod, and he catches the waiter’s eye. I tell myself one more glass isn’t going to change anything and that I’m allowed to have a nice evening. Sitting in a restaurant with someone I used to know is not a crime, not even close, not even in the same postcode as a crime.

My phone buzzes in my bag.

I know before I look. My stomach drops, my fingers go cold around the stem of my glass, and the guilt rises through my chest like something physical – hot, thick, pressing against the base of my throat.

I pull out my phone. The screen glows in my lap.

How long are you going to be?

Alex. No kiss, no emoji, just the question sitting there, an accusation I probably deserve. I told him I was going to a work thing – a drinks party for one of the publishers I do covers for, nothing fancy, just a couple of hours. I told him I’d be back by nine. It’s already quarter past.

‘Everything all right?’ Ross says.

I raise my head. He’s watching me as if he’s waiting for me to tell the truth but isn’t going to force it.

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Just Alex.’

‘Does he know you’re here?’