Page 36 of The Friend Request

The agreement catches me off guard. I’d braced for argument, denial, the smooth deflection he was always so good at – You’re imagining things, Kim, you’re making something out of nothing… – and instead he’s standing here admitting fault in a public shopping centre while a tinny version of a pop song plays from a speaker somewhere above us.

I don’t trust it.

I push off the railing and set off again. He follows. I turn left at a shoe shop, cut through a cluster of browsers outside a bookshop, and emerge near the glass wall that overlooks the street below. Ross is half a pace behind me, not touching, not speaking, just there.

‘I need to say something to you,’ I tell him, still moving, ‘and I need you to let me finish.’

‘All right.’

‘Don’t interrupt me.’

‘I won’t.’

I stop by the glass wall. Below us, buses pass and pedestrians cross at the lights. Beyond them, the buildings of Bristol stretch out under a white sky. I grip the metal railing in front of me and look at the street and not at Ross, because if I look at him I’ll lose the thread of what I need to say.

‘You left,’ I say. ‘When I was seventeen. You disappeared. No goodbye, no explanation, no phone call, no letter. One day you were there and the next you weren’t, and I spent – God, Ross, I spent years trying to understand what I’d done wrong. Years. Not weeks, not months. Years of replaying every conversation, every argument, every look, trying to find the moment where I broke it, where I pushed too hard or said the wrong thing or failed some test I didn’t know I was sitting.’

The words are coming faster now. I can feel them stacking up behind my teeth, pressing forward. My voice is shaking, but I don’t stop because if I stop, I’ll never start again.

‘And it changed everything. You changed everything. The way I am in relationships, the way I hold on too tight, the way I flinch every time Alex goes quiet because some part of my brain still believes that silence means someone is about to vanish. I married a man who is solid and dependable and present, and I chose him partly because he was the opposite of you, and even then – even with him – I’ve spent thirteen years waiting for the catch. Waiting for the morning I wake up and he’s gone.’

My knuckles are white on the railing. My eyes are stinging.

‘And then you came back. Twenty years later, out of nowhere, a friend request, a photograph, and messages from a blank profile. You walked back into my life as though none of it mattered. As though you could just pick up where you left off. As though the girl you abandoned hadn’t spent years building a life designed to survive without you.’

Ross opens his mouth.

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘I’m not finished.’

He closes it.

‘I am married,’ I say. ‘My marriage is not perfect. It’s not what I thought it would be when I was twenty-three, pregnant, terrified, and grateful that someone wanted to stay. But it is mine. Alex is mine. Olivia is mine. The house and the routines and the school runs and the Sunday mornings and the arguments about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher – all of it, mine. And it’s not yours to disrupt, Ross. You don’t get to turn up after two decades and decide that what I’ve built isn’t good enough because it doesn’t include you.’

A woman brushes past me with a Primark bag. I barely register her. My whole body is trembling – arms, jaw, the muscles in my back – and there are tears on my face now, hot and fast, which I wipe with the heel of my hand without breaking eye contact with the street below.

‘You had your chance,’ I say. ‘You had it and you lost it. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear. I’m sorry if you came back with some idea that we could – I don’t know – start again, rewrite the ending, pick up the pieces. But I can’t. I won’t. Because every time I look at you, I see the boy who made me believe I was worth staying for and then proved I wasn’t, and I cannot build anything on that foundation. Nobody could.’

I turn to face him.

He’s standing very still. His hands are at his sides, his coat open, and his face is crumbling, almost, the composure fracturing from the inside, his mouth pressed into a line that isn’t anger or defiance but something rawer than both.

‘Kim,’ he says. ‘Please. If you’d just let me explain why I⁠—’

‘I don’t want your explanation.’ My voice breaks on the last word. ‘I don’t want your reasons or your apology or whatever speech you’ve been rehearsing in your head for the last twenty years. I want my life back. I want to stop checking my phone. I want to stop locking every door in my house. I want to stop looking over my shoulder in car parks and jumping when someone walks behind me in the dark.’

He takes a step towards me. I take a step back.

‘Leave me alone, Ross.’ I’m barely holding on. ‘Just leave me alone. Please.’

I pick up my bag from where it’s slipped down my arm. I turn away from him and walk towards the escalators, and I don’t look back. Not once. Not when I step on to the moving stairs and grip the rubber handrail and feel the steps carry me down towards the exit. Not when I reach the ground floor and weave through the Saturday crowd with tears still wet on my face, and my lungs still burning with everything I’ve said and everything I haven’t.

I walk out of Cabot Circus and into the cold Bristol air. The noise of the shopping centre cuts off behind me like a door closing, and I stand on the pavement and breathe.

It’s done. I’ve said it. The words are out in the world now, hanging in the air between the escalators and the glass walls and the shoe shops, and they can’t be unsaid.

I should feel lighter.

I don’t.