Page 54 of The Friend Request

I don’t want it to be him, I know that much, but the evidence is damning, and I can’t keep pretending. I can’t keep the tiny flicker of hope alive that surely I couldn’t have misjudged someone as badly as I’ve misjudged him. What does that make me? What does that do to the love story we once shared?

But somebody knows which bedroom is mine. Somebody has stood outside my house in the dark. Somebody just sent me a photograph of their body and threatened to destroy my family, and whether it’s Ross or someone connected to Ross, I’m sitting in a car park by the river on my own with no idea what to do next.

I could ring the police. I know I should ring the police – somewhere underneath the panic, the sensible part of me knows that. This is a crime. Those messages, that photo – there are laws for this, there are procedures, I’ve seen the posters in GP waiting rooms and the adverts on the backs of bus shelters, and I used to read them and think how awful for those women without once – not once – imagining I’d be one of them. I’d imagine someone younger, or someone who’d been reckless online, or someone whose situation was somehow more obvious, more dramatic, more clearly not their fault. As if there’s a type.

But I can’t ring the police. Not yet. Not before I’ve spoken to Alex.

Because if I call the non-emergency line, they’ll want to see the phone. They’ll want screenshots, a statement, a timeline. They’ll ask me who might have sent the messages, and I’ll have to say a name, and the whole thing unspools – the school, the library, the kiss, the Facebook messages I didn’t tell anyone about, the birthday party, the kitchen, the wrist. All of it. And before any of that reaches a constable’s notebook, it has to reach my husband, or the marriage will be finished.

Not because of what Ross did. Not because of the messages, or the photo, or the threats. Because I went behind Alex’s back. Because I let a stranger in uniform sit in our living room and tell my husband things about his own wife that I should have told him myself. The story becomes Kim didn’t trust me enough to come to me first, and Alex would be right. He’d be completely, quietly, devastatingly right, and I’d have nothing to say to that because it would be true.

So the police have to wait. And Alex can’t.

I open the glovebox and take the phone out one more time. The lock screen glows up at me – the time, the date, and the photo of Olivia pulling a cross-eyed face at the camera. I set it as my wallpaper last August when we were on holiday in Dorset, and she was being silly on the beach. Brown legs, sandy feet, her hair all over the place, laughing so hard her eyes had almost disappeared.

My girl. My brilliant, stroppy, beautiful girl. Whose name is twelve inches away in a message I’ll never be able to unsee.

I’m done. I’m done sitting in car parks, driving in circles, and telling myself I’ll handle this tomorrow. Tomorrow is the lie I’ve been feeding myself since the first message arrived, and it’s run out. There’s nothing left of it. Tomorrow is how I ended up here – alone, afraid, and clutching my phone.

Tonight, when Olivia’s in bed, I’m going to sit Alex down at the kitchen table and tell him everything. Not the edited version. Not the bits I’ve rehearsed in my head while lying awake at three in the morning. Everything, from the beginning, in order. The school. The library. The kiss. The love story. Ross turning up. The party. The kitchen door closing. His hand on my wrist. And then the messages.

Whatever his face does when I say it – the stillness, the quiet, that terrible silence he goes into when he’s angry, like a door being held shut against something that wants to come through – I’ll take it. I’ll sit there and I’ll watch it happen and I won’t try to soften it or steer him towards the reaction I want. He deserves to feel whatever he feels. He’s earned that much, at least.

I start the engine and pull out of the car park, wipers dragging arcs across the glass, the road appearing in wet grey strips ahead of me. I drive home the long way, past the school, over the bridge, and through the backstreets I don’t usually take. Because I need the extra minutes. I need to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and my brain fixed on something simple and practical before I walk through my own front door and sit down with the truth.

My phone stays in the glovebox. I don’t want to touch it again.

But I can feel it in there. Waiting.

I have to tell him tonight, before this gets worse.

I think it’s already worse than I know.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I wait until I hear Olivia’s door close.

It takes forever. She brushes her teeth, comes back downstairs for water, goes up again, comes back down because she’s left her phone charging in the kitchen. I sit on the sofa with my hands folded in my lap, a cup of tea going cold on the table in front of me, and I smile at her every time she passes. Every smile costs me something I don’t think I’ll get back.

‘Night, Mum.’

‘Night, sweetheart. Love you.’

‘Love you, too.’

Her feet on the stairs. Her bedroom door opening, closing. The faint thump of her dropping on to her mattress, and then the house settles into the quiet that only happens when a teenager has finally stopped moving – not silence exactly, but a held breath, a pause, as if the walls are waiting to see what happens next.

Alex is in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, stacking plates with the careful rhythm he has, each one slotted in at the same angle. He’s loosened his tie but hasn’t taken it off, which means he’s still in work mode, still running on the version of himself that sits across from clients and keeps his face neutral while people tell him things they’d rather not say.

Good. I need that version of him tonight.

‘Alex,’ I say from the doorway. ‘Can you come and sit down?’

He looks up. Something in my voice must signal trouble, because he puts the plate down without finishing what he’s doing, dries his hands on the tea towel, and follows me through to the living room without asking why. He sits at the other end of the sofa. Not far away – just his usual spot, the cushion that’s moulded to him after years of the same position – but tonight the distance between us feels vast, like a gap I’m about to fill with rubble.

‘What’s going on?’ he says.

I stare at my hands then at the cold tea. I stare at the curtains, which are drawn, and the lamp, which is on, and the remote control sitting on the arm of the sofa where Olivia left it, and I think: This is the last moment before he knows. Everything in this room is still the same as it was five minutes ago. Alex is still the man who loaded the dishwasher and kissed his daughter goodnight and doesn’t know what’s coming. And in about thirty seconds that man will be gone, and whoever replaces him will be someone I made.