Page 85 of The Friend Request

‘Not right now. He’s being spoken to separately.’

‘Is he being arrested?’

She pauses. The pause is the answer.

‘Your husband is being arrested on suspicion of manslaughter,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t mean he’ll be charged. It means we need to investigate what happened here tonight, and we need to do that properly, and while that investigation is ongoing⁠—’

I stop hearing her. The words keep coming – custody, solicitor, statement, investigation – but they’re just sounds. Background noise. Wallpaper over the hole that’s opening in the middle of my chest, because my husband just killed a man to save his family, and now they’re taking him away, and I’m going to drive home with our daughter in the passenger seat and walk into an empty house, and he won’t be there.

When the questions finally run out, the female officer brings Olivia back to me, still wrapped in the foil blanket, and she folds into my side and stays there.

Alex appears in the corridor twenty minutes later. He’s flanked by two officers, his hands not cuffed – not yet, I think, or maybe they’ve decided that’s not necessary. Maybe they’re being kind in front of his child, I don’t know, and I can’t ask. He looks at me through the classroom door, and his face is the colour of paper. His eyes are red, and he mouths something I can’t make out. Then he looks at Olivia, and something breaks in his expression – the muscles around his mouth give way, and his chin crumples, and for half a second he looks like a man who is falling and knows there’s nothing underneath.

‘Dad?’ Olivia’s voice is small.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. His voice cracks. ‘It’s going to be all right, Liv. Go home with Mum. I’ll be back soon.’

He won’t. I know that, and he knows that, and from the way Olivia’s hand tightens around mine, she knows it, too. But we let him say it, because what else is there? What else do you say to your daughter when the police are walking you down a school corridor at midnight and the man you killed is lying under a sheet in the room where your wife fell in love for the first time?

They take him down the stairs. I hear their footsteps on the resin floor – three sets, evenly spaced – then the bang of the main entrance door, and then nothing.

The detective gives me a card. She tells me they’ll need a full statement tomorrow, that someone from family liaison will be in touch, that the paramedics have checked Olivia over and she’s unhurt – shaken, marked by the tape, but unhurt. She tells me I can take my daughter home. She says the words gently, as if it’s a kindness, and I suppose it is – the kindness of being allowed to leave the place where your life fell apart instead of being made to sit in it until morning.

I take Olivia’s hand. We walk down the corridor together, past the classrooms and the lockers and the display boards, past the staircase, past the kitchen. The window I climbed through is still open. Cold air is coming through it, and I can smell the rain and the bins and the night outside.

We go out through the main entrance. The car park is full of vehicles – patrol cars, an ambulance, an unmarked car. Blue lights turning slowly, painting the school walls in pulses. Olivia walks beside me with the foil blanket still around her shoulders, holding my hand so tightly my knuckles ache.

Alex’s car is where he left it, parked on a side street round the corner. I find the spare key in my coat pocket – he gave it to me at the kitchen table, before we left, before any of this – and I unlock the doors, help Olivia into the passenger seat, and fasten her belt because her hands are shaking too hard to do it herself.

I get in and start the engine. I sit with my hands on the wheel and my daughter beside me, and the school shrinking in the rear-view mirror, and I think: I should feel something. Relief, grief, terror, guilt. Something.

I don’t feel anything at all.

I pull out of the side street, turn left on to the main road, and drive home.

The house is dark when we get there. I unlock the front door, switch on the hallway light, and stand in the doorway of our kitchen, looking at the table where Alex sat three hours ago and told me to go to the school. His mug is still on the worktop. His jacket is on the back of the chair.

Olivia goes upstairs without speaking. I hear her bedroom door close, then the creak of her bed. I stand in the kitchen and wait for the sound of her crying, but it doesn’t come. Just silence. The fridge humming. The clock ticking.

I sit at the table.

Alex’s chair is empty.

Chapter Forty

I see the letter on the mat when I come downstairs on Tuesday morning – a white envelope with a window, Alex’s name printed behind the cellophane, and the logo of a solicitor’s firm in the top corner that isn’t his own. I know what it is before I pick it up. I know what it is the way you know a phone call at three in the morning is bad news.

I leave it on the kitchen table, propped against the salt cellar, and put the kettle on.

It’s been a month since the school library, since the night that split our lives into before and after. Thirty-one days of waking up in this house and checking, first thing, that Alex is still beside me and Olivia is still in her room and the front door is still locked. Thirty-one days of drinking tea at this table, waiting for the post, jumping when my phone rings and telling myself it’s going to be all right, it’s going to be fine, we’ll get through this.

Christmas came and went somewhere in the middle of it. We did the quietest version we could get away with – a tree Olivia decorated in ten minutes, presents nobody put much thought into, lunch at this table with the phone face down beside the gravy boat. Nobody said his name. We were all grateful when it was over.

I’m not sure I believe it is over yet. But I’m getting better at saying it.

We took Jeff’s Land Rover back in the first week – Alex driving it, me following in the Volvo to bring him home. I stood in the farmyard and tried to apologise for all of it. Jeff put the kettle on instead, cut me a slice of cake, and asked no questions at all.

This morning, though, there’s just me, the kettle, and the envelope propped against the salt cellar, waiting.