Page 82 of The Friend Request

‘After what, Ross?’

‘After I left. After I disappeared. I heard what it did to you – not straight away, not for years, but eventually I heard. And by then I was so ashamed of what I’d done, and so frightened of what you’d say if I came back, that I was paralysed. But I don’t know what else I could have done. Everything was so messed up.’ He runs his hands through his hair again. ‘Every day I thought about messaging you, and every day I talked myself out of it, because what was I supposed to say? Sorry I vanished? Sorry it broke you? Sorry I was seventeen, going out of my mind, and the actions I thought were right at the time followed you around for years?’

My chest is tight. I can feel the years in this room – all of them, the ones we spent here and the ones we spent apart – pressing on the walls.

‘You could have said goodbye,’ I say. ‘That’s all. One word. One phone call. One note – not a brick through a window. You could have said I’m leaving, I’m sorry, it’s over. And I would have cried, and I would have hated you for a bit, and then I would have moved on. But you didn’t give me that. You just went. And I spent years – years, Ross – waiting for you to come back. Checking your name online, walking past your house, wondering what I’d done wrong. Do you know what that does to a person? To be seventeen and in love and have someone just vanish?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know exactly what it does. Because I did the same thing. I typed your name into every search engine going. I found your wedding photos. I saw your daughter’s face on your profile and I sat on my kitchen floor and cried, Kim, because that should have been my life. That girl should have been⁠—’

‘Don’t.’ My voice is sharp enough to cut glass. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you stand there and tell me Olivia should have been yours. She’s mine. She’s mine and Alex’s, and she’s sitting behind me with tape over her mouth because of you.’

Ross flinches. Good. I want him to flinch. I want him to feel one fraction of what my daughter is feeling right now, bound to a chair in a dark library while two adults shout about things that happened before she was born.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘For disappearing. I am. I’ve been sorry every day for years, and I know that’s not enough, and I know it doesn’t fix anything. But I didn’t know what else to do. I was a kid, Kim. I was a frightened kid, and by the time I was old enough to know better, it was too late.’

‘It was too late the day you left.’

‘I know.’

The library is quiet. The lamp hums on the desk. Outside the tall windows, the sky is black and empty, and I can see our reflections in the glass – two figures standing apart, one bound figure in a chair between them. We look like ghosts. We look like the teenagers we used to be, playing out a scene we should have finished decades ago.

‘The cottage,’ I say. ‘You followed me to Wales.’

Something shifts in his face. ‘What?’

‘The cottage Alex booked for me. You found it. You came to the door, you tried to break in, you circled the building in the dark and threw a brick through the window with that note wrapped around it. You terrorised me, Ross. You stood outside in the pitch-black and rattled the handles and shoved the door until I thought it was going to give, and I was on the floor, on my hands and knees, crawling across the kitchen tiles in the dark⁠—’

‘Kim.’ His voice is different now. Harder. The softness is gone. ‘That’s not how it happened.’

‘Don’t lie to me. Not now, not here⁠—’

The tackle comes from nowhere.

One second Ross is standing in the lamplight with his mouth open, the next he’s gone – taken off his feet by a shape that comes out of the dark to his left, fast, low, and brutal. The sound is enormous. Two bodies hitting the floor, the crack of a skull on something hard, a grunt that could be either of them. Books scatter off the nearest shelf. The lamp shudders on the desk, and the light swings wildly, throwing shadows that leap and stretch across the ceiling.

Alex.

He planned it before he dropped me at the end of the road. We planned it together, sitting at the kitchen table with the note between us: Kim goes in first, Alex goes in after, and if Ross tries anything – anything at all – Alex is there. I didn’t want him to. I told him the note said alone, and he looked at me with those tired, furious, terrified eyes and said, ‘I don’t care what the note said. I’m not sending you in there without someone at your back.’

And now he’s on the floor with Ross, and they’re fighting.

I spin towards Olivia. She’s thrashing in the chair, her eyes wild, muffled screams coming through the tape. I drop to my knees beside her, grab the tape at her wrists, digging my nails under the edge and pulling. It doesn’t give. It’s wound tight, layer over layer, and my fingers are shaking so badly I can barely grip it. I yank. A strip peels free, and Olivia yelps behind her gag, and I say, ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry, hold still, hold still for me⁠—’

Behind me, the fight is ugly. I can hear it – the scuff of shoes on carpet, the thud of a body against the shelves, heavy breathing, a sound that might be a fist connecting. I don’t turn around. I can’t. If I look, I’ll stop, and if I stop, Olivia stays in this chair.

Another layer of tape comes free. Then another. I can see her wrists now – red, raw, the skin underneath white and dented from the pressure – and I’m pulling faster, tearing it away in strips that stick to my fingers and curl on the floor. Her right hand comes loose. She immediately reaches for the tape on her mouth, clawing at the corner of it with stiff fingers. I move to her ankles and start on the bindings there.

‘Mum—’ The word comes out muffled, then clear as the tape rips free from her mouth. ‘Mum, behind you⁠—’

The scream splits the room open.

It’s Alex. I know it before I turn, the way you know your own child’s cry in a crowd of children. This is Alex screaming, and it’s not pain, it’s not anger – it’s shock. Pure, raw, animal shock, the sound of a man who has just seen something his brain can’t make sense of.

I turn.

The shelves nearest the back wall have come away from their fixings. They’re leaning at an angle, books scattered across the floor in a fan, and Alex is on his knees beside them with his hands in front of him, palms out, like someone surrendering. His face is white. His mouth is open. He’s staring down.

Ross is on the floor.