Page 81 of The Friend Request

The sound she makes goes through me, hard and sharp. A muffled sob, trapped behind the tape, her whole body jerking forward against the bindings. Her eyes lock on to mine, and they say everything – Mum, Mum, help me, please, I’m here, I’m scared, get me out – and I am across the room in three strides, reaching for the tape, my fingers finding the edge of it at her wrist⁠—

‘Hello, Kim.’

I freeze.

The voice comes from the left side of the room, behind the shelves, where the shadow is deepest and the lamp’s light doesn’t reach. It’s quiet, calm, almost soft. A voice I would know if I heard it underwater, in a crowd, in a dream, in the dark.

I turn.

Ross steps out of the shadow. He’s standing with his back to the wall, arms at his sides, watching me. His face is half lit by the lamp – one side gold, one side black – and he looks the same and he doesn’t. Older. Thinner. Harder around the eyes. As if since meeting me again, his body has reacted by accelerating the ageing process.

What worries me most is his expression. I can’t read it. I have no idea what he’s thinking, what he’s planning, or what he’s going to do.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he says.

Behind me, Olivia sobs behind the tape.

And I am standing in the library where I fell in love for the first time, with my daughter tied to a chair and the boy I loved standing in the dark, and the only thought in my head – the only one, drowning out everything else, louder than the fear, louder than the fury, louder than the years of silence that brought us here – is this:

What have I done?

Chapter Thirty-Eight

He looks like a stranger wearing Ross’s face. He’s standing three metres from me with his arms at his sides and his back to the library wall. The lamplight is catching the grey at his temples and the lines around his eyes, and I know him and I don’t. The boy I loved is in there somewhere – in the jaw, the posture, the way he holds his shoulders slightly forward as if he’s on high alert – but the man standing in front of me is someone else. Someone who has tied my daughter to a chair with silver tape and waited in the dark for me to find her.

‘Let her go,’ I say.

‘Kim—’

‘Let her go. Right now. Whatever this is, whatever you want, she’s thirteen years old and she’s terrified. You’re going to untie her and let her walk out of this building.’

Ross doesn’t move. He looks at Olivia, then back at me, and his expression does something I don’t expect – it folds from anger into something closer to pain.

‘I needed you to come,’ he says. ‘I needed you to actually turn up, and I knew you wouldn’t unless⁠—’

‘Unless you kidnapped my daughter?’

The word sits between us. Kidnapped. It sounds absurd, like something from a film, not something that happens in a school library in Keynsham. But Olivia is behind me, and the tape is on her mouth, and the sound of her breathing through her nose is the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard.

‘I didn’t hurt her,’ Ross says. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘She’s bound to a chair, Ross.’

‘I know. I know how it looks. But I couldn’t think of another way to make you listen, because every time I’ve tried to talk to you – every message, every meeting – you’ve run. You’ve shut me down or walked away or brought your husband into it, and I needed one conversation. That’s all. One conversation where you can’t leave.’

Behind me, Olivia makes a muffled sound against the tape. I can feel her panic like heat on my back. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to turn around, rip the tape off, get her free, get her out. But Ross is between me and the door, and his voice is doing the thing it always did – pulling me in, making me listen, making me believe that if I just stay a little longer, everything will make sense.

I hated that about him. I loved it, too.

‘You wanted me,’ I say. The words come out flat. ‘That’s what you said in the shopping centre. That’s what you’ve been saying since you came back. You wanted me, you always wanted me, poor Ross with his broken heart. And meanwhile, you’ve been turning up at my house, following me to Wales, throwing bricks through windows⁠—’

‘I wanted you,’ he says, and his voice stumbles on the second word. ‘I’ve wanted you since I was fourteen, Kim. Since that day in this room, right here, between those shelves. I kissed you, and something happened to me, and I’ve never been able to undo it. Do you know what that’s like? To meet someone at fourteen and know – just know, with everything in you – that they’re the person, the one person, and then lose them? Not because you stopped caring, but because you were terrified?’

‘Terrified of what?’

He takes a breath. He pushes his hand through his hair – that old gesture, the one he did when he was nervous, when he was working up to saying something that cost him – and for a second I’m back in this room at fourteen, standing between the shelves while a boy with dark hair and a blazer two sizes too big tells me he likes me, and the world outside the library windows doesn’t exist.

‘Of you,’ he says. ‘I was terrified of you. And of what happened after.’