Page 50 of The Friend Request

I blink, and I’m back. Strip light. Birthday cake. Ribena stain.

‘I have to go,’ I say and move to step past him towards the door.

His hand catches my wrist.

His touch isn’t hard or rough. Just enough to stop me, his fingers closing around the bone, and I freeze mid-step with my breath trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat. The party thumps on through the wall. Someone laughs – Alex, I think. My husband is laughing in the next room while another man holds my wrist in my own kitchen and I can’t move.

‘Let go of me,’ I say.

He doesn’t.

‘Kim, please⁠—’

‘Let go of me, Ross.’

His grip isn’t painful, but it doesn’t need to be. His thumb is resting against the inside of my wrist, right on the pulse point, and he must be able to feel it – how fast it’s going, how hard my heart is hammering – and that’s worse than if he’d grabbed me roughly. Worse because it’s gentle. Because it’s the touch you give someone you care about, and I don’t want his care. I don’t want his tenderness. I don’t want anything from him except for him to be a memory I can fold up and put in a drawer and never think about again.

But he’s here. He’s real. He’s standing in front of me with his hand on my wrist and my husband on the other side of a wall, and I’m frightened.

Not of him.

Of what I might do if he doesn’t let go.

‘Please,’ he says, and there’s something raw in his voice that I don’t want to hear. ‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I never⁠—’

The door bangs open.

It happens so fast I barely register what’s coming before the sound fills the kitchen like a wave – Olivia first, bouncing through the doorway with her hands already reaching for the cake, then Alex right behind her carrying the lighter he’s been hunting for, then a flood of kids and parents pouring in from the living room, jostling and elbowing and all of them singing at the tops of their voices.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you⁠—

Ross drops my wrist. He steps back towards the worktop. I step sideways towards the sink. And by the time Alex reaches the table and starts clicking the lighter over the candles – swearing quietly when the first one won’t catch – there’s a good three feet of empty kitchen between me and Ross, and we’re both smiling.

I’m smiling so hard my face aches.

Happy birthday, dear Kim⁠—

Olivia is beaming, her cheeks flushed pink with pride at the cake she’s made me, her friends packed in behind her. One of them is filming on her phone. Alex gets the last candle lit and holds his hands up like a conductor, and the whole room bellows the final line. I smile at them all and try to look happy, and something cracks open inside my ribcage because this is it. This is my life. This is the thing I chose, the thing I built, the thing I should want more than anything.

And I do want it. I do.

‘Make a wish!’ someone shouts.

I lean forward, my hair swinging across my face, and blow. The candles go out all at once in a curl of pale smoke that drifts between us and dissolves against the ceiling.

Everyone claps. The kitchen is full of bodies, noise, and warmth. Olivia is already pulling the candles out of the icing with her fingers, and Alex is rooting through the drawer for the big knife. One of the dads is making a joke about needing the fire brigade, and nobody is watching me.

Nobody except Ross.

He’s by the door, a paper cup in his hand that I didn’t see him pick up, watching everyone else clap, his face arranged into the pleasant half-smile of a family friend who’s happy to be here. And as I watch, he lifts the cup a fraction – barely a toast, the smallest movement – and his eyes find mine across the crowded kitchen.

I look away first.

I always look away first.

‘Right then,’ Alex says, pressing the knife into the sponge, ‘who wants a corner bit?’

I take the stack of plates from the worktop and start handing them round, and my hands are steady, and my smile is holding, and when Olivia grabs me around the waist and says ‘Happy birthday, Mum’ into my jumper, I pull her in tight and press my mouth against the top of her head and close my eyes.