Page 27 of The Friend Request

‘Kim, stop. Just give me five minutes⁠—’

I drive away from the kerb. The tyres squeal on the wet road, the car lurches forward, and Ross appears in the wing mirror, standing in the road with his arms at his sides, shrinking as I accelerate. Then I turn the corner and he’s gone.

I drive.

I don’t know where I’m going for the first thirty seconds. I just drive – left, right, left again, through the residential streets around the high street, past houses with lit windows and parked cars and wheelie bins on the kerb. My hands are locked on the wheel, my jaw is clenched, and I’m trembling as if I’ve been pulled out of cold water.

He followed me. He was there. He was in Keynsham, behind me in the dark, and if I hadn’t locked the car door⁠—

I pull over. A cul-de-sac off the main road, quiet, empty, a street where people are indoors watching television and putting their children to bed. I stop the car and turn off the engine. Then I sit in the silence, press my hands against my face, and try to breathe.

My whole body is trembling. Not just my hands – my arms, my legs, my shoulders, my jaw. A full-body tremor that I can’t control, as if my nervous system has been ripped out and replaced with something made of wire and static.

He was there. Right there. His hand on the door handle. His face at the glass.

I take out my phone. My first instinct is Alex, but Alex is in Leicester with Olivia and his parents, and if I call him now, voice breaking, barely coherent, he’ll ask what happened, and I’ll have to tell him everything – the dinner, the walk, the kiss, the messages, the blackmail, the man who just chased me down a dark lane and tried to get into my car – and it will all come out at once, messy, terrible, and impossible to take back.

I can’t. Not like this. Not over the phone while he’s standing in his mother’s kitchen with Olivia in the next room.

I lock the phone and drop it in my lap and lean my head on the seat.

How did he know where I was? How did he know I’d be at that pub, on that street, at that time? Did he follow me from the house? Has he been watching all day, waiting for Alex and Olivia to leave, waiting for me to be alone?

The thought revolts me. I check the mirrors. The cul-de-sac is empty. No figures, no movement, no dark coat, no face pressed to the glass.

I’m alone.

I start the engine, drive home, and park the car. The house is dark. I unlock the front door, step inside, and close it behind me. Once it’s locked with the chain on, I stand in the hallway with my back against the wood and my eyes closed.

The television is still on in the living room, the cooking show long finished, replaced by something I don’t recognise. The kitchen light is on. The kettle is cold. Everything is exactly where I left it two hours ago, undisturbed, untouched, safe.

But safe doesn’t mean what it used to.

I check the back door. Locked. I check the windows – kitchen, living room, dining room, utility room. All locked. I go upstairs and check the bedroom window, the bathroom window, Olivia’s room. Everything shut. Everything sealed.

I come back downstairs and sit on the bottom step with my coat still on and my bag still over my shoulder and stare at the front door. And I think about Ross Mercer standing outside my car with his hand on the handle and his mouth forming my name through the glass.

He knows where I live. He knows when I’m alone. He followed me through the dark, ran when I ran, and the only thing that stopped him was a locked car door.

I grab my phone and look at the blank-profile conversation one more time. My message. His silence. No reply, no dots, no new threat.

He didn’t need to type a response.

He came in person.

Chapter Twelve

Ross and I had been together for three months, or maybe four – I’d lost count because I’d started measuring time differently. Not in weeks or homework deadlines or how long until half term, but in firsts. First kiss, in the school library. The first time he waited for me after last period and walked me most of the way home, peeling off two streets before mine so nobody would see. The first time he rang me at half nine on a Tuesday and talked until my mum shouted up the stairs that she needed the phone. First proper argument – about nothing, about whether I’d been flirting with someone at a party when I hadn’t even spoken to the boy in question – and then the first make up afterwards, which felt sweeter than any of the good bits that came before it.

I kept a list. Not written down, because that would have been mad, and if Lisa had found it I’d never have heard the end of it. But I kept it in my head, a running tally of evidence that what Ross and I had was different from what other people had. Special. Ours.

Nobody at school knew. That was part of it – the secret made everything more exciting, like the two of us existed in a separate room that nobody else could get into. We didn’t hold hands in corridors. We didn’t sit together at lunch. If someone mentioned his name, I’d shrug and say I didn’t really know him, and the lie made me smile inside.

Lisa thought I was being weird.

‘You’re miles away again,’ she said one lunchtime, waving a chip in front of my face. ‘You’ve gone all dreamy. Are you on something?’

‘I’m just tired,’ I said. ‘Didn’t sleep well.’