Page 58 of The Friend Request

‘You’re leaving me there on my own?’

‘I’m putting you somewhere safe while I work out what to do about Ross.’ His voice is even and very controlled, as if he’s rehearsed this in his head during the forty minutes of silence and is now delivering it from memory. ‘The booking’s paid for. The place is remote – miles from anywhere, no neighbours, barely any phone signal. Nobody knows about it except me. Ross doesn’t know about it. That’s the point.’

‘Alex, I don’t want to be⁠—’

‘And I need space, Kim.’ He says it quietly, but the edge is there, running underneath like a wire. ‘I need time to think about what you told me without you sitting across from me, because right now I can’t do both at the same time. I can’t look after you and be furious with you in the same room. I’ve been trying it for two days, and it isn’t working.’

I open my mouth and close it again. My eyes are stinging, and my throat is tight. The rain is lashing the car, and the lane ahead is so narrow that the hedges are scraping both wing mirrors. I feel suddenly, horribly small – like a child being sent somewhere she doesn’t want to go while the adults decide what happens next.

‘What about Olivia?’ I say.

‘Olivia is fine. She’s with Mum and Dad. I’ll pick her up at the weekend, and she’ll go back to school on Monday. Everything will be normal as far as she’s concerned.’

‘And what do I do?’

‘You wait. You walk. You think. Whatever you need to do.’ He hesitates, and for a second the mask slips, and I see something underneath – tiredness and hurt that goes deeper than anger. ‘I’m not punishing you, Kim. I know it feels like that, but I’m not. I just – I can’t be near you right now and be the person I need to be. I need a clear head, and I can’t have one while I’m looking at you and thinking about him in our kitchen.’

I don’t say anything after that. There isn’t anything to say. He’s right, and we both know it, and the fact that he’s right makes it worse rather than better because at least if he were being unreasonable I could feel angry instead of ashamed.

The lanes get narrower. The hills get closer, and the rain eases to a fine mist that hangs in the valley like gauze. Stone walls line the road. Sheep scatter as we pass. There are no other cars, no houses, no signs of anything except green fields, grey sky, and the road winding upwards into the cloud.

We turn off the lane on to a gravel track, and the cottage appears at the end of it – small, stone-built, slate-roofed, with a blue front door and an empty window box that’s been battered sideways by the wind. There’s a yard with a wooden gate, and beyond it the fields slope away towards a line of hills that vanish into the low cloud. It’s beautiful. Genuinely beautiful, in a way that hurts, because I can picture exactly what Alex imagined when he found it online – the two of us arriving on a Friday evening, tired and pleased, opening the door, lighting the fire, pouring wine, sitting together in the quiet and remembering what it was like before everything got so complicated.

He would have been so proud of himself. He’d have shown me the view, pointed out the walking paths on the map on the kitchen wall, and said something practical about the hot water system. I’d have teased him for being romantic in the most organised way possible, he’d have pretended to be offended, and we’d have been all right.

We might have been all right.

Alex carries my bag to the front door and unlocks it with a key from an envelope he pulls out of the glovebox. Inside, the cottage is clean and cold and smells of woodsmoke and damp stone. There’s a kitchen with a scrubbed table, a sitting room with a fireplace laid ready to light, a narrow staircase leading up to a bedroom I can’t see. He puts the bag down by the stairs, checks the taps, and opens the fridge, which someone has stocked with milk, bread, butter, and a packet of bacon. This should last in tandem with the food we’d stopped to buy along the way. I stand in the doorway and watch him moving through the rooms, ticking items off a mental list, making sure everything works, making sure I’ll be warm and fed and safe, because even now – even while he’s furious and hurt and can barely look at me – he can’t stop being Alex.

‘Signal’s patchy,’ he says, coming back to the kitchen. ‘I checked before I booked it. You might get a bar on the hill behind the house, but down here it’s more or less nothing. There’s Wi-Fi, the code’s on the router in the sitting room, but apparently that’s also temperamental. And there’s a bloke – a farmer, Jeff, lives over the hill. The owner mentioned him. Said he keeps an eye on the place.’

‘Right,’ I say.

Alex stands in front of me. He’s still in his work coat, and his shoes are muddy from the yard. His face is flushed from the cold and from everything he’s not saying, and I stare up at him. For the first time since I sat him down on the sofa two nights ago, he looks back at me properly. Not past me. Not through me. At me.

‘Come here,’ he says.

I step forward, and he wraps his arms around me and pulls me in. I press my face against his chest, close my eyes, and breathe him in – washing powder and rain and the leather of his car seats – and for five seconds the world shrinks to his arms and his heartbeat and the solid warmth of him. I want to stay here forever, right here, in the gap between being held and being let go.

He kisses the top of my head. Then he steps back and holds me at arm’s length, and his face has that complicated expression again – love and anger and grief all stacked on top of each other, none of them winning.

‘You’ll be safe here,’ he says. ‘Nobody knows where you are. Just me.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll call you. Give me a few days.’

‘All right.’

He squeezes my arms once, hard, and then he lets go and walks out of the kitchen and through the front door. I follow him to the threshold and watch him cross the yard in three long strides and get into the car without turning around. The engine starts. The headlights come on. He reverses down the track, and the gravel crunches under the tyres. The brake lights glow red in the mist, and then he’s gone, swallowed by the lane and the hedges and the valley closing behind him.

I stand in the doorway and listen to the engine fade. It takes a long time. The sound carries over the fields, getting thinner, until there’s nothing left but wind and sheep and the drip of water from the guttering above my head.

The hills are grey and huge, and there’s not a single light in any direction.

I go inside. I close the door. I lock it.

The cottage is very, very quiet.