Page 61 of The Friend Request

The hill is a black outline against the sky. No moon tonight – too much cloud – but there’s a faint ambient glow from somewhere, enough to separate the ridge from the sky above it. I can see the shape of the land, the long, slow curve of it rising from the valley, and the ragged line where the grass meets the cloud.

And then I see something else.

A shape. On the ridge. Just left of centre, where the ground crests before dropping away towards Jeff’s valley. A dark vertical shape on the dark horizon, too upright for a sheep, not a tree because there are no trees on that ridge. I’ve walked it four times now, and there’s nothing up there except grass and wind and a tumbledown wall.

My breath catches.

I stare until my eyes ache and the edges of my vision swim, and try to make sense of what I’m staring at. It could be a fence post I haven’t noticed before. It could be a section of wall I’ve only ever seen from a different angle. It could be a trick of the cloud, a deeper patch of dark against the dark, my exhausted brain turning nothing into something because it’s spent three days wound tight and needs a threat to justify the tension.

But it looks like a person. It looks exactly like a person standing on the ridge, facing the cottage, not moving.

My pulse hammers in my throat. I press my forehead to the cold glass and cup my hands around my eyes to block the reflection from the lamp behind me, and I peer out again.

The shape hasn’t moved.

How long has it been there? Was it there when I walked to the kitchen five minutes ago, or has it appeared since? Has it been there all evening, standing on the hill in the dark while I sat by the fire and did my jigsaw and drank my tea, and I only noticed now because I happened to look at the right time?

Who is standing on that hill?

The wind slams into the window, and I flinch backwards, slopping tea on to my wrist. When I check again, the shape is different. Smaller, maybe. Or gone. Or just the dark playing tricks, the cloud shifting, the ridge rearranging itself the way landscapes do when you stare at them too long in poor light.

I can’t tell. I genuinely cannot tell whether I just saw a person on the hill or whether I’ve frightened myself so badly over the past week that my eyes are inventing things to be afraid of. Both feel equally possible. Both feel equally real.

I close the curtains.

I do it fast – one hand on each side, pulling them together so the black glass disappears, and the room becomes a sealed box of warmth and firelight. The fabric doesn’t meet in the middle. There’s a gap, an inch wide, and I can see a sliver of darkness through it. I hate that gap so much that I fetch a bulldog clip from the kitchen drawer and pinch the curtains shut.

Better. Slightly.

I wash up my mug then bank the fire. I check the front door is locked – it is, I checked it an hour ago, and the hour before that – and I turn off the kitchen light and go upstairs. Every step on the narrow staircase creaks under my feet, and the sound is too loud in the quiet.

The bedroom is cold. I get under the covers in my socks and my jumper because I can’t be bothered to change, and lie on my back staring at the low white ceiling, listening to the wind trying to get in.

I want to go home. The wanting is so fierce it makes my throat close – home, my house, my bed, my daughter’s door across the landing, Alex’s weight on the other side of the mattress, the orange glow of the street light through our blue curtains. I want to walk downstairs in the morning and find Olivia sitting at the table with her phone and her cereal, ignoring me in that comfortable, offhand way she does on school mornings. I want to hear Alex’s keys in the door at six o’clock. I want the kettle and the radio and the sound of next door’s cat scratching at the fence, and I want it so badly that my eyes sting and I press my face into the pillow and let out a long breath that’s closer to a sob than I’d like to admit.

But home is where Ross knows I live. Home is blue curtains and a bedroom window someone has watched from the street. Home is a kitchen where a man held my gaze while my family sang happy birthday, and I don’t know what’s waiting for me there – Alex’s forgiveness or Alex’s fury, a brown envelope from a solicitor or another message from an unknown number. Or nothing at all, which might be worse than everything.

The wind pushes against the cottage. The gate bangs once – the stone must have shifted – and then falls quiet.

I close my eyes and pull the covers up to my chin. I tell myself the shape on the hill was nothing. A post. A shadow. My own fear reflected back at me by a landscape that’s too big and too dark to read.

I tell myself I’ll sleep. I tell myself I’m safe, because Alex said I’d be safe here, and Alex doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.

But I leave the landing light on.

Just in case.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It started with small questions. That was how I lost him – not in one dramatic blow, but in the slow, grinding repetition of a girl who couldn’t stop asking and a boy who couldn’t be bothered to answer.

The party. Lisa. Ross’s hand on the wrong waist, his mouth too close to the wrong ear, and the way he’d looked at me when I confronted him afterwards – not guilty, not caught, just annoyed, as if I’d interrupted something tedious rather than something treasonous. He said it was nothing. He said Lisa had been drunk and leaning on him and he’d been steadying her, and that I’d seen what I wanted to see because I’d been in a mood all night and was waiting for a reason to kick off.

I tried to believe him. I lay in bed that night and ran through it frame by frame – the cramped living room, the music, the cheap party lights that made everything feel other-worldly – and I told myself that maybe the angle had been wrong, or the light had tricked me, or maybe Lisa really had just stumbled and Ross really had just caught her, and the closeness I saw was just physics, just bodies in a crowded room doing what bodies do.

But I didn’t believe it. I’d watched his face when he didn’t know I was watching and seen something I couldn’t unsee – a softness, a lean, a flicker of attention that had nothing to do with keeping a drunk girl upright.

So I asked again.