Page 79 of The Friend Request

After Sam there’s Danny, who’s louder and funnier and takes me to a gig in Bristol where I have a brilliant time for two hours then cry in the toilets because the lead singer has dark hair and a lean face, and for one horrible second, under the lights, I think⁠—

But it’s not him. It’s never him.

Danny doesn’t last either. Nor does the one after that, a boy whose name I have to work to remember now, which makes me feel guilty but also proves the point: they were placeholders. Nice boys, kind boys, boys who did nothing wrong except not be Ross. And I knew it was unfair, I knew I was holding every one of them up to a ghost and finding them wanting, but I couldn’t stop. You can’t stop looking for something you never found.

I go to university. Bristol, because I can’t bring myself to leave the area, even though the area is the problem. I study graphic design, I make friends, I go to parties. I learn to cook pasta, manage a hangover, and pay my own phone bill. I build a life. And underneath the life, like a crack in the foundations that nobody can see from the road, Ross is still there.

I search for him online. Not constantly – I’m not unhinged, or at least I don’t think I am – but often enough that I know it’s not healthy. Every few months, usually when I’m tired or lonely or slightly drunk or all three, I type his name into the search bar and hold my breath. Ross Mercer. Two words. And the internet gives me almost nothing: a bare profile with no photo and no posts, a name on a list I can’t make sense of, a possible match in a city I’ve never been to. Never enough to build a picture, never enough to answer the only question I actually want answered.

Why did you leave?

I’m twenty-three when I meet Alex.

He’s at a friend’s birthday party in a bar on the waterfront, and he’s standing near the door looking uncomfortable in a way that makes me like him before I’ve even spoken to him. He’s got short brown hair, is wearing a clean shirt, and has tired eyes. He’s holding a pint he hasn’t touched and watching the room with a frown that suggests he’d rather be somewhere quieter. I go over and say something – I don’t remember what, something about the music being too loud, something ordinary. When he smiles at me, it lights up his face, and I think: Oh. All right then.

Alex is nothing like Ross. That’s the first thing I notice and the thing that keeps drawing me back. He’s solid where Ross was restless. He’s open where Ross was guarded. He tells me about his family, his job, his plans, his opinions on everything from football to tax law, and there are no locked rooms in him, no corridors that lead to doors marked private. He is exactly who he appears to be, and after years of chasing a boy made entirely of gaps, the relief of that is enormous.

We move quickly. Dinner, then weekends, then keys, then the conversation about whether this is serious, which Alex handles the way he handles everything – plainly, honestly, without drama. ‘I’m in,’ he says, one Sunday morning, sitting on the edge of my bed with his coffee. ‘If you are.’ And I say yes, because I am, because he makes me feel safe, and because safe is the thing I’ve been missing since I was seventeen years old and didn’t know it.

But the night before I say yes, I search for Ross one last time.

I find a profile. An actual profile – not the bare-bones of the old account but something with a photo, a location, a life I can almost see the outline of. He’s older, thinner in the face, and his hair is darker than I remember, or maybe the lighting is bad. He’s not smiling. The photo looks like it was taken in a pub, and there’s someone else’s arm at the edge of the frame, cut off at the elbow. The location says Bristol.

Bristol. He’s in Bristol. He’s been in Bristol, and I’ve been in Bristol, and we’ve been breathing the same air and walking the same streets, and he’s never once⁠—

There’s a message button.

I stare at it for a long time. I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees, Alex’s toothbrush in the mug by my sink, and his jacket over the back of my chair. My finger hovers over the button, and I think about what I’d say. I rehearse it in my head – casual, breezy, hey, long time, just saw your profile, how are you – and then I rehearse the true version – where did you go, why did you leave, do you know what it did to me, do you even care? My chest is tight, my throat is thick, and I want to press it so badly my hand shakes.

I close the laptop.

Because Alex deserves better than that. Alex, with his clean shirts and his honest face, and his ‘I’m in if you are,’ deserves a woman who is here, fully here, not reaching back into the past with one hand while holding his with the other. And if I message Ross now – if I open that door again, even a crack – I don’t know what will come through it. I don’t know what he’ll say, or what I’ll feel, or whether the answer to the question I’ve been carrying for years will break something I’ve only just started to build.

I close the laptop and I choose Alex.

We move in together. We get pregnant faster than we planned – a missed pill, a bottle of wine, a Sunday afternoon that turns into Olivia – and Alex proposes three months later, on one knee in the kitchen of our rented flat in Keynsham with a ring he bought on his lunch break and a speech he’s clearly practised in the car. It’s not flashy. It’s not cinematic. But it’s Alex, and it’s real. When he puts the ring on my finger, I cry, he tries not to, and we stand in the kitchen with the washing machine running and the bins needing taking out, and we hold each other, and I think: This is it. This is the life I’m supposed to have.

Olivia arrives in March. She’s small, furious, red-faced, and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The midwife puts her on my chest, and she stops screaming and blinks up at me with these dark, unfocused eyes, and something locks into place inside me that I didn’t know was loose. Love doesn’t cover it. There isn’t a word for it. It’s bigger than love, fiercer, more frightening, and from the moment she curls her fingers around mine, I know I would do anything for this child. Walk into fire. Walk into the dark. Anything.

Alex and I build a life around her. We buy a house in Keynsham – a semi with a garden and a dodgy boiler and a kitchen we keep saying we’ll do up. He qualifies as a solicitor, I start freelancing from home, and we embrace family life: nursery runs, bath time, laundry, weekends at his mum’s, weekday mornings where we pass Olivia between us like a relay baton and somehow get out the door with shoes on. It’s not perfect. We’re tired, we’re stretched, we argue about money and mess and who forgot to buy milk. But it’s ours. It works. Most of the time, it’s good.

And Ross fades.

Not all at once. Not cleanly. But gradually, the way a scar fades – still there if you look, still tender if you press, but no longer the first thing you see when you catch your reflection. I stop searching for him online. I stop hearing Radiohead and feeling sick. I stop walking past the school and thinking about the library and the window and the boy who climbed through it. I let it go, or I think I do, or I tell myself I have, which might not be the same thing but feels close enough to get on with.

By the time Olivia starts secondary school, Ross Mercer is a name I haven’t typed into a search bar in years. He’s a memory I’ve filed under Before, in the part of my life that happened to a different version of me – younger, sadder, less sure of herself. I have a husband, a daughter, a mortgage, a career, and a life that Ross never touched. I tell myself that the story of us – the library, the window, the silence – is finished.

That’s the end of it. That’s where it stops.

Until now.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The school looks smaller than I remember.

That’s the first thing that hits me, standing on the pavement across the road with my hands in my pockets and my heart going so fast I can feel it in my wrists. The building is the same – the same brick, the same flat roof, the same row of windows along the first floor that used to glow yellow when the heating was on and the caretaker hadn’t done his rounds yet – but it’s shrunk. The wall I remember as enormous is chest height. The gates I remember as imposing are just gates. And the sign by the entrance, which used to feel like the border of an entire country when I was fifteen, is peeling at one corner and lit by a street light that flickers every few seconds like a dying pulse.

I’m stalling. I know I’m stalling.