Page 43 of The Friend Request

‘You don’t have to say that,’ Lisa says. Her eyes are shining. ‘I mean, you can be angry. You’re allowed to be angry.’

‘I’m not angry. I mean it. We were sixteen. You said it yourself – we were kids.’

‘But you loved him.’

‘I did.’

‘And I knew that, and I still⁠—’

‘Lisa.’ I reach across the table and put my hand on her wrist. She goes still, and I feel the tremor in her arm. I squeeze gently and let go. ‘It was years ago. I’ve got a husband. I’ve got Olivia. I’m not going to fall apart because you kissed a boy behind the sports hall when Blur were still in the charts.’

She laughs. It’s wet and trembling, more relief than humour, and she wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand and shakes her head.

‘God, I thought you were going to throw your coffee in my face.’

‘That would be a waste of a flat white.’

She laughs again, the shake gone, and we’re just two women in a café sharing something that used to be enormous and has somehow, over the years, shrunk to a size that fits in the palm of one hand.

But underneath the forgiveness, underneath the calm I’m showing Lisa, something else is happening. Something quieter. Because hearing her say it – hearing her describe Ross seeking her out, finding her alone, making it happen, and then shrugging when she told him to stop – I’m watching a picture I’ve carried for years develop a crack.

The Ross I kept in my head all this time. The Ross who was mine, who shared with me something untouchable and pure that nobody else could understand. That Ross didn’t exist. He kissed my friend at a party I’d left early because I was ill. He found her behind the sports hall and tried his luck because she was there and I wasn’t and he could.

That’s not a great love story. That’s just a teenage boy doing what some teenage boys do when they think nobody’s watching.

And the worst part – the part that stings my eyes – is that I built my whole adult emotional life on the memory of him. Every time Alex fell short, every time the marriage felt boring or stale or difficult, I measured it against Ross. Against the intensity. Against the way he made me feel at sixteen, when I had no mortgage, no child, no job, no responsibilities, and loving someone was the only thing I had to do. I held my husband up to a ghost and found him wanting, and the ghost was never even real.

I’ve been so stupid.

So unbelievably, breathtakingly stupid.

‘Kim?’ Lisa says. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

‘Sorry. Just thinking.’

She watches me, and her face changes. The relief fades, and something else takes its place – concern, or maybe caution.

‘Can I say something else?’

I nod.

‘I don’t know if this is my place, and you can tell me to shut up, but—’ She pauses. Lowers her voice, even though nobody in this café is paying the slightest bit of attention to us. ‘Ross wasn’t who you thought he was. I know that’s easy for me to say now, and I know you loved him, but the way he was with me – it wasn’t charming. It was calculating. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew I wouldn’t tell you. He knew I’d feel too guilty to say anything, and he used that.’

My skin prickles. The toddler has stopped banging. The coffee machine has gone quiet. It feels as though the room has drawn back half a step to give Lisa’s words space.

‘When I think about it now,’ she says, ‘with adult eyes, I can see it for what it was. He played people. He worked out what they needed to hear, made you feel like you were the only person in the world, and then he did exactly whatever he wanted when your back was turned. That’s not love, Kim. That’s control.’

I don’t say anything. I can’t, because my throat has closed, and everything Lisa is describing – the charm, the calculation, the way he made you feel like you were the centre of everything and then did precisely as he pleased – sounds so familiar that I want to be sick.

Because she’s not just talking about the past. She’s talking about now. She doesn’t know it, but she’s describing the exact pattern of the last few weeks – the messages, the warmth, the nostalgia, the slow, careful reeling in, and then the text that turned everything cold.

I don’t tell her about the texts, or the friend request, or the shopping centre meeting, or the threat. I don’t tell her that Ross has been circling me like something patient and hungry. I say none of it.

‘If I could go back,’ Lisa says quietly, ‘I would stay well away from him. Not because of what happened between us. Because of who he is.’

She holds my gaze, no trace of the nervous flutter she walked in with. And I can see that this isn’t a woman covering her own tracks or easing her conscience. This is a warning. A proper, thought-through, kept-it-in-for-twenty-years warning.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ I say. My voice comes out too even. The voice I use at Olivia’s school when I’m furious about something and don’t want to show it. ‘I mean that. Thank you.’