Page 33 of The Friend Request

But now that he’s sitting here, now that the moment is real, and the clock is ticking and his eyes are on mine, I can’t find the opening.

How do you tell your husband you kissed someone else?

Not like that. Not as a bald fact dropped on to the table between the mugs. There’s context. Twenty years of history, a week of escalating dread, and a man who chased me through the dark two hours ago. If I start with the kiss – if I let the kiss be the headline – then everything that comes after will be heard through the lens of infidelity, and the stalking, the blackmail, and the fear will sound like excuses.

I need to start with Ross coming back. With the messages. With the threat.

But if I start there, Alex will ask why I didn’t tell him sooner. And I’ll have to explain that I didn’t tell him because there were things I didn’t want him to know, and then we’re back to the kiss anyway, arriving at it from a different angle but landing in exactly the same place.

There is no clean way to say this.

‘Kim.’

I blink. Alex has shifted forward, his weight on his forearms, and his face has changed – the professional mask slipping into something more tentative. More human. He looks tired. Not just from the drive, but from something deeper, something that’s been sitting behind his eyes for weeks and that I’ve been too wrapped up in my own panic to notice.

‘Can I go first?’ he says.

My stomach drops. ‘What?’

‘I’ve been thinking about this all the way home. Olivia was asleep in the back, and I had three hours with nothing to do except think, and I—’ He stops. Rubs his thumb across the edge of his mug. ‘I need to say something, and I’d rather say it badly than not say it at all.’

I nod. My throat is tight. Whatever is coming, I don’t think I’m ready for it, but I nod anyway because my voice has gone and nodding is all I’ve got.

Alex takes a breath.

‘You’ve been distant,’ he says. ‘For a while now. And I know – before you say anything – I know I’m not blameless in that. I work too much. I’m not always present when I’m here. I come home and I’m still in my head, still picking over cases, still thinking about other people’s problems instead of ours. I know that.’

I open my mouth. He holds up a hand – gently, not a stop, more a please, let me finish.

‘But it’s not just the work, Kim. It’s us. Something’s changed, and I can feel it, even if I can’t put my finger on exactly when it started. You’re here, but you’re not here. You smile at me across the kitchen, and it’s like you’re pretending something instead of feeling it. And I catch you sometimes, when you think I’m not looking, and you’ve got this expression that I don’t recognise. This faraway thing. Like you’re somewhere else.’

My chest hurts. A physical ache, dull and spreading, pressing outwards against my ribs as though my lungs are trying to expand and something is holding them in place.

He’s so completely, horribly right that I want to cry, because the distance he’s describing isn’t about Ross – or it wasn’t, not at first. It started before the messages, before the friend request, before any of it. It started in the quiet erosion of two people who love each other but have stopped reaching across the gap. Ross didn’t create that distance. He just walked into it.

‘I don’t want to lose this,’ Alex says. His voice fractures on the word ‘lose’, and it goes through me like a blade. ‘I don’t want to wake up one day and realise we’ve become one of those couples who live in the same house and share a bed and co-parent brilliantly but haven’t looked at each other properly in years. Because I think that’s where we’re heading, Kim. And it scares the hell out of me.’

I stare at him. My hands are shaking under the table, my fingers twisted together in my lap, and there’s a burning behind my eyes that I’m fighting. Because if I cry now, I’ll fall apart completely, and falling apart is not what this moment needs.

He thinks this is about us.

The realisation arrives slowly, like a coin settling on a surface. He doesn’t know about Ross. He hasn’t found out, hasn’t seen the messages, hasn’t discovered the photo. What Alex is talking about are the cracks, the silences, the slow drift that’s been pulling us apart – and he came home ready to talk about it. He came home ready to fight for us.

And I came home with a confession lodged in my throat, resembling a fish bone.

‘I’ve been trying to work out the right way to say this,’ Alex goes on. He’s staring at his hands now, turning his mug slowly on the table. His nails are bitten shorter than usual. ‘And there probably isn’t one. But I think the gist of it is this: I love you. I love our life. I love our daughter and our home and the fact that you’re the person I come back to at the end of every day. And I know I don’t say that enough, and I know that not saying it is part of the problem.’

He glances up.

‘But I can’t fix this on my own, Kim. And I don’t think you can either. I think we’ve both been carrying things separately when we should have been carrying them together. At some point, we stopped trusting each other with the heavy stuff, and that’s dangerous. That’s how marriages end. Not with some big dramatic blow-up, but with two people slowly deciding it’s easier to be alone in the same room than to actually talk.’

He reaches across the table.

His hand covers mine – the familiar weight of his fingers wrapping around my knuckles – and I flinch, just slightly, an involuntary spasm that I hope he doesn’t notice but know he does because his grip tightens for a second, a reflex, as though I’ve confirmed something he was afraid of.

‘I want to keep trying,’ he says. ‘But we need to put the stuff behind us. The resentment, the assumptions, the – whatever it is that’s built up between us. We need to let it go and start again. Not from scratch. Just from here. From tonight.’

His thumb moves across my knuckle. A slow, deliberate stroke. And I look at his face – the tired eyes, the bitten nails, the jaw set firm against the vulnerability of what he’s just said – and I feel two things at once, so violently opposed that they almost cancel each other out.