Page 25 of The Friend Request

In the car, while Olivia fiddles with the radio, I pull it out. There’s a new email from a client, but that’s it.

The dots have gone. No new message. No response. No threat. No photograph forwarded, no screenshots sent, no bomb detonated.

Just the silence. And the ghost of those dots, pulsing and vanishing, pulsing and vanishing.

I put the phone in the glovebox, close it, and start the engine.

‘Hot chocolate?’ Olivia says.

‘Hot chocolate,’ I say.

We drive to the high street and park outside the café. I buy my daughter a large hot chocolate with marshmallows and no whipped cream, and sit across from her at a small table by the window drinking a tea I don’t taste and listening to her talk about school. I smile and nod at the right moments, but underneath the table I grip my knees so hard I’ll find bruises there later.

He didn’t reply.

He’s going to reply.

The silence is worse than words, because silence can become anything. It can become a forwarded photograph, a message to Alex, a knock on the door, a phone call that tears the whole thing open. Silence is just the gap before the next move, and I don’t know what his next move is, and the not knowing is eating me alive.

We drive home. I carry the school report inside and pin it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a strawberry that Olivia made in primary school. I cook dinner and load the dishwasher. I check my phone eleven times between five o’clock and bedtime, and every time the conversation looks the same – my message, his silence, no dots, no reply, nothing.

I go to bed with the phone on the bedside table and lie in the dark listening to Alex breathe and waiting for the screen to light up.

It doesn’t.

But I wait anyway.

Chapter Eleven

The house is too quiet without them.

Alex took Olivia to his parents’ place in Leicester this morning – a weekend visit they’ve done every few months since she was born. His mum likes to see her, his dad likes to comment on how much she’s grown, and Olivia likes the attention and the fact that Grandma lets her eat biscuits for breakfast. Normally I’d go, too, but this time I said I had a deadline. A cover that needs finishing by Monday. Alex didn’t argue. He packed the car, kissed me on the cheek in the hallway, told me to get some rest, and drove off with Olivia waving from the back seat.

That was nine hours ago. I’ve done nothing since.

The cover is open on my laptop. I’ve moved the same text box four times. I’ve stared at the colour palette until my eyes ached, then stared some more. I’ve made three cups of tea and drunk one. I’ve checked my phone so many times the screen has a smudge from my thumb that won’t wipe clean.

No new messages. The conversation with the blank profile sits where it’s been sitting for days – my reply in blue, his silence underneath, the two ticks confirming he read it. No dots. No response. Just the patient quiet of someone who hasn’t finished yet.

By six o’clock the walls are closing in. The house feels wrong without Olivia’s noise and Alex’s presence, too still, too clean, too much like a set from a property programme where nobody actually lives. I’ve turned on every light downstairs, and the television is running in the background, some Saturday evening cooking show I’m not watching. The fridge hums, the boiler clicks, and none of it fills the silence the way it should.

I need to get out.

Not far. Not for long. Just out of these four walls and into somewhere with other people and background noise and the ordinary comfort of being in public. I want a drink – not alcohol, not tonight, just something warm in a glass in a room where I’m not alone – and I want to sit and breathe and feel like a normal woman doing a normal thing on a Saturday evening.

I put on my coat, pick up my keys, and drive to the high street.

The café Olivia and I went to for hot chocolate is closed, so I park round the corner and walk to the pub at the end of the row – The Crown, a place I’ve been to a handful of times with Alex for Sunday lunch, nothing special, just wooden tables and brass taps and a fireplace that’s always lit in winter. It’s busy enough to feel safe and quiet enough to feel calm. I order a lime and soda at the bar and carry it to a table near the window.

For twenty minutes, it works. I sip my drink and watch people come and go – couples, groups, a man reading a newspaper at the bar, two women laughing over a bottle of wine at the table behind me – and I relax, just enough for me to take a full breath without my ribs aching. The fire crackles. The jukebox plays something old and vaguely familiar. The ice clinks in my glass.

I don’t check my phone. Not once. I leave it in my bag and I sit and I breathe and I let the pub do what pubs are supposed to do, which is make you feel like part of the world instead of hiding from it.

By half seven, the drink is finished and the pub is getting louder. A group of lads has arrived at the bar, all pints and noise, and the jukebox has been turned up. I don’t want to be here when it tips from cosy into rowdy, so I pick up my bag, zip my coat, and walk out into the cold.

The high street is quiet. Most of the shops are shut, and the pavements are empty except for a couple walking their dog on the far side and a teenager on a bike who pedals past without looking up. The street lights are on, throwing orange circles on to the wet tarmac, and the sky is dark and starless.

My car is parked on a side street, two minutes from the pub. I know the route – left past the chemist, right at the estate agent, down the narrow lane between the old post office and the church hall. I’ve walked it a dozen times. It’s nothing. Three hundred metres of pavement and street lights and parked cars and terraced houses with lit windows.