Page 60 of The Friend Request

I smile my first genuine smile in days. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

‘Good.’ He taps his stick on the ground once, a small, decisive gesture, and adjusts the collar of his jacket. ‘Right then. I’m off before the rain starts again. Nice to meet you, Kim. Give us a knock if you need anything.’

‘I will. Thank you, Jeff.’

He nods, touches the brim of his cap, and carries on up the path with his stick swinging and his boots finding the ground with the sure rhythm of someone who’s been walking these hills for decades. I watch him until he crests the ridge and disappears over the other side, and then it’s just me, the valley, the stream, and the sheep dotted across the far slope like spilled cotton wool.

I stand there for a while, breathing. The air is cold and tastes of grass and rain, and a tiny flicker of hope lights inside me. A small, welcome easing of the stress that’s been churning my stomach for days.

There’s a person over the hill. A kind person with a kettle and a dog and a chimney that smokes. If I get lost, I follow the stream. If I need help, I knock. It’s such an everyday thing – a neighbour, a cup of tea, a door I could walk to if I had to – but out here, where ordinary has been stripped away so completely that I’ve started talking to sheep just to hear a voice, it feels like a rope thrown into deep water.

I turn back towards the ridge. The light is already fading at the edges – not dark yet, but that slow greying that Jeff was talking about, when the colours drain out of the hills and everything flattens to the same dull pewter. He’s right. I need to be inside before it goes completely.

I climb the stile and follow the path along the ridge and down the other side. The cottage appears below me – white walls, blue door, the window box, the yard. I let myself in, lock the door, and stand in the kitchen with my coat still on, dripping on the tiles. The silence wraps around me again, but it feels different this time. Not pressing. Just quiet.

I fill the kettle. Then I light the fire the way the instruction card showed me, scrunching newspaper under the kindling and holding the match until it catches. The flames jump, the wood cracks, and the room starts to warm. I sit on the rug in front of it with my tea and my phone – no signal, as usual – and I scroll through the photos I took today. The valley. The stream. The sheep in their line. The distant farmhouse with its thread of smoke.

I’ll show Olivia when I get home. She’ll roll her eyes and call them boring, then save three of them to her own phone when she thinks I’m not looking.

The fire pops. The wind presses against the windows. Outside, the hills are turning dark.

I’m all right. Just for now, just for this evening, sitting on the floor with a warm mug and a fire and the knowledge that there’s a kind old man with a kettle over the hill.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The shameful truth is that I keep checking my phone, not for signal, not for Alex, but for the grey bubble I’m dreading. Every time I climb the ridge and hold the phone above my head like some desperate woman in an advert, I’m preparing myself for the screen to fill with filth. The photo. The threats. Olivia’s name in a stranger’s mouth. I’m ready for it every single time, my stomach tight and my breath held. But every single time there’s nothing.

Just wind and sheep and one bar of signal that flickers and dies before I can use it.

Maybe he’s stopped. Maybe whatever sick little engine was driving those texts has run out of fuel. Perhaps he’s moved on to someone else, or he’s just bored with me. But losing interest is the same as being safe.

Some evenings, sitting by the fire with the wind moaning in the chimney, I can almost convince myself that the whole thing happened to a different woman in a different life.

Almost. Not quite.

Because the other silence – the one from Alex – is eating me alive.

He said he’d call. He said give me a few days, and I have. But the few days have stretched on, and I haven’t heard his voice since he stood in this kitchen checking everything in the cottage worked and was as it should be. I’ve sent him texts that may or may not have gone through, short functional messages – arrived safely, signal bad, Wi-Fi worse, hope Olivia ok, call when you can – and I don’t know if he’s read them. I don’t know if he’s tried to reply and the signal’s swallowed it, or if he’s sitting in our living room staring at his phone the way I’m staring at mine, composing messages he keeps deleting.

Or maybe he’s not thinking about me at all. Maybe he’s thinking about Ross. Maybe he’s already done something about Ross and he’s not telling me because I don’t deserve to be told. The thought of Alex doing something rash – Alex, who has never done a rash thing in his life, who indicates at roundabouts and reads instruction manuals cover to cover – sends a shiver through me.

And Olivia. My girl. Days since I’ve heard her voice. The missing is physical now, a dull, constant ache in my sternum that gets worse at night when the cottage goes dark and there’s nothing left to distract me from it. I think about her at Alex’s parents’ house, eating his mum’s shepherd’s pie at the kitchen table, watching whatever she watches on her phone with her knees pulled up to her chin. I think about her brushing her teeth in the bathroom, using a towel that isn’t hers, sleeping in the spare room with the squeaky radiator that Alex always complains about when we visit. She’ll be fine. She’s a resilient kid, tougher than I give her credit for, and Alex’s parents adore her and spoil her rotten. In fact, she’s probably having the time of her life.

But she doesn’t know why she’s there. She doesn’t know why her mum packed a bag and drove to Wales without explaining. She doesn’t know that the life she walks back into when this is over might look different from the one she left, and the guilt of that – the guilt of being the person who set this in motion, makes me feel sick.

I keep busy during the day. I walk, take photos. I clean the cottage, which doesn’t need cleaning, rearrange the books on the shelf above the fireplace, and cook meals I don’t enjoy from the supplies we bought. I found a jigsaw puzzle in the cupboard under the stairs – a thousand pieces, a picture of Tenby harbour – and I’ve been working on it at the kitchen table in the afternoons, sorting edge pieces and trying not to think about anything except where the blue sky ends and the sea begins. It helps, in the way that all pointless activities help when your mind is trying to eat itself. It gives my hands something to do.

But the evenings are hard.

On Thursday, the wind comes up properly. It starts around six, a low, steady push against the cottage walls that makes the window frames rattle and sends the gate in the yard banging into its post. I wedge the gate with a stone, but it doesn’t help much because the wind isn’t coming from one direction. It’s circling. Gusting from the west, then swinging round to the north, then dropping for a few minutes before coming back harder from somewhere else, as if the valley can’t make up its mind.

By eight o’clock, the cottage feels smaller. The fire is lit and the curtains are open – I’ve been leaving them open in the evenings because the view of the hills and the sky is the closest thing to company I’ve got – but the glass is black now. The wind is pressing on the panes, and the flames are jumping sideways in the grate every time a gust finds the chimney.

I can’t settle. The jigsaw gets discarded after ten minutes. I try reading a paperback I found in the bedroom – some crime novel with a cracked spine and a missing cover – and I read the same paragraph three times without taking in a word. I make tea and drink half of it. I stand at the kitchen window and look out at the yard, which is just visible in the light from the kitchen, and beyond it the black mass of the hill rising in front of a sky that’s only marginally less black.

This is the problem with evenings out here. During the day the landscape is open and wide and I can see for miles, and there’s comfort in that – nothing can creep up on you when the ground is bare and the light is good. But after dark, the same openness turns inside out. The hills are still there, huge and empty, but now I can’t see them, and everything I could see twelve hours ago has become everything I can’t. The darkness feels occupied in a way that daylight never does.

I stand at the sitting room window with my arms folded, my tea cooling in my hand, and I look out.