Page 12 of The Friend Request

The question is delivered softly, but it still winds me. I take a breath and shake my head. My face is doing something I can’t control – maybe shame, maybe defiance, or something caught between the two.

‘He thinks I’m at a work party.’

Ross doesn’t react to that. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow or sit back, or give me a side-eye that makes me feel worse than I already do. He just nods once, slowly, and picks up his glass.

‘Do you need to go?’ he says.

Yes. I should pick up my coat, pay for my half, walk out the door, get in the car, and drive home to my husband, my daughter, and the life I chose. I should text Alex back right now – Leaving soon, twenty minutes – and mean it.

But then I look at Ross. At his face across the table, lit warm by the low overhead lights, his eyes steady on mine. The easy wreckage of the evening is spread between us – crumbs, napkins, laughter still hanging in the air as though it’s something I could reach up and touch. And I think about going home to the quiet kitchen, and Alex on the sofa with his laptop, and the conversation we’ll have that isn’t really a conversation, just two people exchanging logistics in the same room.

I put the phone back in my bag.

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s fine.’

Ross holds my gaze for a second longer than he needs to. Then he smiles a slow smile that reaches all the way through me and settles in a place I thought I’d shut down years ago – and lifts his glass.

‘All right then,’ he says.

I lift mine. We drink. And the guilt is still there, sitting heavy in the pit of my stomach, but I ignore it. I push it down, smile back, and I stay.

I stay because this is the first time in months that I feel like someone is actually looking at me.

The second glass of wine goes down warm and easy, and by the time we’re talking again I’ve almost forgotten the text, almost forgotten the lie, almost forgotten the woman I’m supposed to be tonight – the one at the work party, drinking Prosecco, making small talk about print runs and cover concepts. That woman doesn’t exist. She’s a version of me I created so I could sit here instead, across from a boy I once loved, who vanished from my life without warning and came back years later and reminded me of everything I’ve been missing.

Ross tells me about the conservation work. About living in Portugal for a year, about the heat, the coast, the silence of it. I listen, watch his mouth move, and think there is a version of my life where I’m sitting here with no ring on my finger, no lie on my phone, and no husband waiting for me in a house a few miles away.

But that isn’t the version I got.

‘I should go,’ I say eventually, though I don’t sound like I mean it. ‘I really should.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s been…’ I trail off, because every word I can think of – lovely, nice, wonderful – sounds ridiculous and paper-thin compared to what it actually was. ‘It’s been really good to see you.’

‘You, too, Kim.’

We split the bill. He helps me into my coat, his hand brushing my shoulder, and the touch is so light and so brief that I almost convince myself I imagined it. We walk out into the street, and the air hits me – cold, wet, Bristol at night, car headlights on rain-slicked tarmac – and I stand there with my keys in my hand, my bag over my shoulder, and I don’t know how to say goodbye to him.

‘Shall we walk for a bit?’ he says.

I should say no, find my car, text Alex back, and drive home like the faithful wife I’ve always been. Instead, I gaze up at Ross, smile, and say, ‘Why not?’

Chapter Six

We head in the wrong direction.

Not wrong geographically – Ross doesn’t know where I live, so he can’t know that turning left out of the restaurant takes us along the river towards the main road, away from the car park where I left the Volvo. But I don’t correct him. I let him lead, and I fall into step beside him. The rain has eased to a fine mist that settles on my coat and my hair and makes the street lights look blurred and soft. I don’t say anything because saying something would mean acknowledging that I should already be in the car, already texting Alex, already halfway home.

Instead, I’m here. Strolling through Bristol at ten on a weeknight with a man my husband doesn’t know exists.

The guilt should be unbearable. It isn’t. That’s what frightens me.

‘I parked the other way,’ I say eventually, once we’ve crossed the bridge and turned on to the path that runs along the water. The river is dark and flat, reflecting the lights from the buildings on the far side, and the air smells of wet stone.

‘I know,’ Ross says.

‘You know?’