Page 78 of The Friend Request

He puts the note down. Looks at me. And for the first time since the officers left, the anger in his face recedes far enough for me to see what’s underneath. Not forgiveness or trust. Just a man who loves his daughter more than he hates what I’ve done, and is trying to work out how to use what’s left.

‘You go,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow night. You go to the school, and you do what he says, and you find out where Olivia is.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘I stay here. By the phone.’

‘And if something goes wrong?’

He doesn’t answer straight away. He stares at the clock, at the note, and then at me. His eyes are still wet. His jaw is still tight. But his voice, when he speaks, is steady.

‘Then I call the police back, and I tell them everything you didn’t. His name, the school, the whole lot. But that’s the last resort, Kim. Not the first.’

‘I know.’

‘You go after dark. Nine, half nine. Whatever window you used to use – you find it and you go in. And you bring her home.’

He says it like it’s a plan with steps and an outcome. Go to the school, find Ross, get Olivia. But I can see his hands on the table are trembling, and the muscle in his jaw is jumping, and I know that underneath the plan there’s nothing solid. Just fear and love and the hope that doing the wrong thing for the right reason might, just this once, be enough.

‘All right,’ I say.

Alex nods. One short, hard nod. Then he stands and walks to the sink, runs the tap, and splashes water on his face. He stays there with his hands gripping the edge of the worktop, water dripping from his chin, staring out at the dark garden where Olivia used to play on the grass in summer doing cartwheels while we watched from the kitchen window.

I fold the note and put it back in my pocket.

Tomorrow night, I walk into whatever Ross has waiting for me.

And I either come out with my daughter, or I don’t come out at all.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The first week, I tell myself he’s busy.

It’s easy enough to believe. Ross has things going on – he’s always had things going on, even when he won’t tell me what they are – and a week isn’t long, not really. People go quiet for a week all the time. I go quiet for a week sometimes, when schoolwork piles up, or Mum is in one of her moods, or I just can’t be bothered to wash my hair and face the world. A week is nothing. He’ll turn up at the school gates on Monday with his collar up and that half-grin and some excuse I’ll pretend to believe, and we’ll walk to the park and sit on the wall by the river and everything will go back to how it was.

Monday comes. He doesn’t.

By the second week, the telling-myself gets harder. I walk past his house twice – not stalking, just checking, just happening to be in the area, which is a lie I’m already getting good at – and the curtains are drawn. His mum’s car isn’t in the drive. There’s a recycling box by the front door that nobody’s brought in, and the garden looks wrong in a way I can’t pin down until I realise it’s the lack of mess. Ross’s bike isn’t propped against the wall. His trainers aren’t by the step. The house looks like a place someone has finished with.

I try his phone. It rings and rings and goes to a voicemail that’s never been set up. I try it again the next day, and the day after that, and on the fourth attempt the number doesn’t ring at all. Just a dead tone, flat and final. I stand in the hallway with the phone pressed to my ear and listen to it until my mum tells me to get off the line because she’s expecting a call.

By the end of the month, I know he’s gone.

I don’t know where. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was his choice or his mum’s or something else, something I’m not clever enough or old enough to work out. All I know is that the boy I kissed in the library, the boy who climbed through the window with me and sat in the dark and said things that made me feel like the most important person alive – that boy has vanished. No goodbye. No note. No explanation. Just silence, clean and total, as if I dreamt him.

The silence is the worst part.

If he’d dumped me – if he’d said I don’t fancy you any more, or I’ve met someone else, or this was fun but I’m bored now – I could have cried and eaten chocolate, slagged him off to Lisa, and got on with it. That’s what heartbreak is supposed to look like when you’re seventeen. Messy, loud, dramatic, finite. You fall apart in your bedroom for a fortnight and then you put on lip gloss and go to a party and get off with someone terrible and it’s over.

But Ross didn’t dump me. Ross disappeared. And disappearing isn’t an ending – it’s a door left open, a sentence without a full stop, and I spend the next year walking past that door and peering through it and waiting for someone to come back and close it properly.

Nobody does.

The silence follows me. That’s what I don’t expect. I think it’ll fade – the way a bruise fades, yellow at the edges first, then gone – but it doesn’t. It just changes shape. At seventeen, it’s sharp, hot, and constant. I cry in the bath, write terrible poetry, and play the same Radiohead album until Mum threatens to snap the disc.

At eighteen, it’s duller but heavier, a weight I carry in my chest that flares up at odd moments: a song on the radio, a boy in town who walks the same way, the smell of the dusty heating in an old building. At nineteen, it’s quieter still, but it’s there. Always there. A low hum under everything, like tinnitus. The sound of someone missing.

I date. I try. There’s a boy called Sam who I meet during my gap year. He’s nice enough and tall enough and likes me enough, and we go to the cinema twice and kiss in his car and it’s fine. Fine is the word I keep using – fine, yeah, he’s fine – and Lisa looks at me over her coffee and says, ‘You know fine means rubbish, right?’ and I laugh and change the subject. Sam lasts three months before he tells me I’m hard to reach, which is a polite way of saying I’m always somewhere else. He’s right. I am somewhere else. I’m sitting on a wall at seventeen with a boy who is about to leave without telling me.