Page 63 of The Friend Request

It didn’t work. By the end of the week I was wound so tight I could barely eat, and when Ross cancelled our plans on Saturday to go to a mate’s house instead, I broke. I texted him fourteen times in two hours. I called and hung up. I called again and let it ring until his voicemail picked up, then sat on my bedroom floor with my phone in my lap, my face wet, and my chest heaving. And I knew, I absolutely knew, that I was making it worse, and I could not stop.

Ross came to see me the next day. He sat on the low wall outside my house – our wall, the one we’d claimed as ours since the first week we were together – and he looked at me, and there was something in his face I hadn’t seen before. Not anger. Not impatience. Something finished.

‘I need a break,’ he said.

The word ‘break’ went through me, sharp and terrible.

‘A break from us?’

‘A break from this. From—’ He gestured vaguely between us. ‘From all of it. I need a week. Just a week, on my own, to get my head straight.’

‘Ross—’

‘Don’t ring me. Don’t text me. Just give me the week, and I’ll come back, and we’ll sort it out.’

I stared at him. The wall was cold under my legs, the sky was overcast, and a car went past playing something loud with the windows down. Everything felt unbearably normal for a moment that was splitting my life in half.

‘A week,’ I said.

‘That’s all.’

‘And then you’ll come back.’

‘And then I’ll come back.’

I started crying. I didn’t decide to, it just happened, the way breathing happened, the way blinking happened, involuntary and unstoppable. The tears came, and my face crumpled, and I pressed my hands over my mouth to hold the sound in, and I heard myself say it – the thing I’d been saying too often, the thing that had lost its power through repetition but that I meant, God, I meant it more than I’d ever meant anything⁠—

‘I love you. Please don’t go. I love you, Ross, I love you so much⁠—’

He put his arms around me. He pulled me in and held me against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat through his jacket and his chin resting on the top of my head. He held me tightly and steadily, and he didn’t cry. His breathing stayed even. His hands didn’t shake. He held me the way you hold someone when you’ve already made a decision and the holding is the last part of it – not a beginning, not a promise, just a closing.

I felt it. Even then, through the tears and the panic and the desperate clutching, I felt the difference between being held by someone who was staying and being held by someone who was leaving.

I just couldn’t let myself know it yet.

He pulled back. He kissed my forehead – a dry, brief, terrible kiss, a kiss you give a child before you turn the light off – and he stood up from the wall, put his hands in his pockets, and walked away down the street. He didn’t look back. I watched him get smaller and smaller, past the postbox and the bus stop and the turning for the high street. I sat on the wall and waited for him to glance over his shoulder, just once, just a flicker, because that would mean something, that would mean he was already regretting it, that would mean the week would pass and he’d come back and we’d fix it.

He turned the corner without looking back.

I sat on the wall until the cold came through my jeans even more and my tears dried to a tight, salty film on my cheeks, and I told myself it was a week. Just a week. Seven days. I could survive seven days. I’d keep busy and stay calm and not text and not call, and on the eighth morning I’d wake up and he’d be there, and the nightclub, Lisa at the party, and the fighting would all be behind us, and we’d start again.

Seven days passed. Then eight. Then ten.

He didn’t call. He didn’t text. He didn’t appear at my door, or on our wall, or at school on Monday morning. His phone went to voicemail every time I rang it, and his MSN went quiet. His mates shrugged when I asked and looked away when I pushed, and the days kept passing and the silence kept growing, and I kept waiting on the wall after school, every afternoon for two weeks, watching the end of the street for a figure I already knew wasn’t coming.

He never came back.

No explanation. No goodbye. No final message, no mutual friend delivering a sorry excuse, no letter, nothing. Ross Mercer walked away from me on a grey afternoon and vanished from my life as completely as if someone had wiped him off the surface of the earth. And the girl he left sitting on that wall – seventeen, tear-stained, sick with love, still believing that if she just waited long enough, he’d come round the corner – spent the next twenty years carrying the wound without ever understanding what had caused it.

I carried it into my twenties. I carried it into my marriage. I carried it into the spare room where I worked and the kitchen where I cooked and the bed where I lay beside a good man who loved me and wondered, in the dark, private hours before sleep, what I had done that was so terrible it had made a boy walk away without a word.

I never found out. Not from Ross. Not from anyone.

Until the friend request.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I can’t do another day on my own.