Page 5 of The Friend Request

Ross Mercer.

I put it down again and go to my desk. I’ve got a cover to finish for a small press in Edinburgh – a psychological thriller, dark background, serif font, a woman’s silhouette – and I need to have the final version across by Friday. I open my laptop, load the file, adjust the kerning on the title, and spend twenty minutes staring at a screen without seeing it.

All I can see is his name.

I email the client to say the file will be a day late and close the laptop. Then I shower, get dressed, drive Olivia to school with the radio filling the silence between us, and come home to an empty house.

The day crawls by. I sit in the dentist’s waiting room with Olivia beside me, her legs crossed, her phone in her hand, her thumb scrolling through something I can’t see. The room smells of antiseptic, and the receptionist is on the phone using a tone so bright it makes my teeth ache. There’s a fish tank in the corner with two sad-looking fish circling the same plastic castle, and a stack of leaflets about gum disease fanned out on the coffee table like a threat.

‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ Olivia asks without looking up.

‘Twenty minutes. Maybe less.’

‘Can we get McDonald’s after?’

‘We’ll see.’

She goes back to her phone. I sit with my bag on the floor between my feet, and I feel it – that taken-for-granted feeling that’s been building all day. Alex in the kitchen, tying his tie, not even considering that he could be the one sitting here. Me, rearranging again. Me, always the one who bends.

I take out my phone.

I don’t mean to open the app. I’m just going to check my emails, or look at the news, or do any of the mindless things you do when you’re sitting in a plastic chair waiting for your daughter’s name to be called. But my thumb finds the icon, the screen loads, and there it is, right at the top.

Ross Mercer has sent you a friend request.

His profile picture is small, but I can make out his face. Older, obviously – we’re all older – but still him. Dark hair, greying a bit at the sides. A half-smile that isn’t quite a smile, more like he’s been caught mid-thought. He’s outdoors somewhere, his coat collar turned up, trees behind him. He looks well. He looks like someone I used to know so completely that the shape of his face was more familiar than my own.

My stomach lurches, and I don’t know if it’s from excitement or fear.

I sit there with my thumb hovering over the screen, and I think about Alex. About the kitchen this morning, the kiss on the top of my head, the Goldberg case, the meeting that couldn’t move. I think about how I’ve been sitting in waiting rooms and rearranging deadlines and sorting things out for years, and nobody once has asked me if I’m all right with that. I think about the fact that I’m thirty-seven and I can’t remember the last time I felt like someone actually saw me, not as a wife or a mother or a person who handles things, but as me. Kim.

And I think about Ross Mercer, who disappeared when I was seventeen and took something with him that I’ve never got back.

‘Olivia Stiller?’ the receptionist calls.

Olivia stands, tucks her phone into her pocket, and walks towards the corridor without looking back. I watch her go. The door swings shut behind her.

I’m alone in the waiting room.

I press accept.

It takes less than a second. A tap of my thumb, a brief loading circle, and then his name slides from the request list into my friends list as if it belongs there, as if it’s always been there. Ross Mercer. Connected.

My heart is hammering. Actually hammering, like I’ve done something dangerous, like I’ve opened a door I can’t close. I lock the screen and put the phone face down on my knee and press my hands together, and the antiseptic smell of the room feels suddenly too sharp and too close. One of the fish bumps its nose against the glass, turns, and swims the same loop again.

It’s just a friend request. People accept them every day. Old classmates, university friends, people from jobs you left ten years ago. It means nothing. It doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It doesn’t have to mean anything at all.

So why do I feel like I’ve just told a lie?

I sit very still and wait for Olivia to come back. I try to make the feeling go away, but it won’t. It sits on my chest like a hand pressing down – warm and heavy and wrong. I think about Alex’s face if he saw the notification. I think about what I’d say. Oh, just someone from school. Nobody important. And I know, even as I rehearse the words, that they wouldn’t be true.

The door opens. Olivia comes out with a sticker on her jumper and the bored expression of a teenager who has survived something deeply beneath her.

‘All fine,’ she says. ‘Can we get McDonald’s now?’

‘Come on, then.’

I pick up my bag and my phone and follow her out into the car park. When the fresh air hits my face and I feel my cheeks blister, I know it’s not the cold.