Page 86 of The Friend Request

Alex comes down at half seven. He’s dressed – shirt, trousers, belt – but he isn’t going to work. He hasn’t been to work in four weeks. The firm have been good about it, or as good as a solicitor’s firm can be when one of their own is under investigation for manslaughter. They’ve called it compassionate leave, which is a polite way of saying please stay home until we know whether you’re going to prison. He comes into the kitchen, sees the letter on the table, and stops.

‘Is that⁠—?’

‘I think so.’

He picks it up. Turns it over. Doesn’t open it.

‘I’ll read it after breakfast,’ he says and puts it back against the salt cellar. He fills his mug from the kettle as if it’s any other morning, as if the envelope sitting close to his elbow doesn’t contain the thing that will decide the rest of his life.

This is what Alex does. He portions out the fear into small, containable blocks and deals with each one in turn – breakfast, letter, whatever comes next – because if he lets them run together, if he lets the whole thing hit him at once, he’ll go under. I’ve watched him do it every day since he came home from custody with a grey face and gravel in his voice and held Olivia on the sofa for forty minutes without saying a word. He manages. It’s the most Alex thing about him, and it’s the thing that frightens me most, because one day the managing will stop working and I don’t know what’s underneath.

Olivia appears at quarter past eight. She’s in her school uniform – they agreed she’d go back this week, her and the counsellor, a gradual return, mornings only. Her hair is brushed, her bag is over her shoulder, and she looks, from the doorway, like any other thirteen-year-old getting ready for school. It’s only when she comes closer that I see the marks. The skin on her wrists has healed, mostly – the redness is gone, the raw patches have faded to a pink that will keep fading until there’s nothing visible – but she still pulls her sleeves down over her hands. She still tugs the cuffs of her jumper past her knuckles and holds the fabric in her fists. I notice it every time, and every time it goes through me.

‘Toast?’ I say.

‘Not hungry.’

‘Half a slice. With Marmite. Come on.’

She sits at the table, and I make her toast. She eats half of it and leaves the crusts. Alex reads something on his phone and doesn’t look at the letter, and for five minutes we are a family having breakfast. It’s the performance that keeps us going. Not a lie, exactly – we are a family, we are having breakfast – but a version of normal that takes effort, that requires all three of us to agree, silently, that we will sit here and eat and speak and not mention the library or the letter or the fact that Alex’s hands are shaking around his mug.

Olivia leaves for school at half eight, insisting she’s safe enough to get there without our help. I walk her to the door and watch her go down the path. She turns at the gate and gives me a wave that’s half-hearted but real, and I wave back and stand there until she’s round the corner and out of sight. The counsellor says she’s doing well. She says Olivia is processing, which is a word I’ve come to hate because it sounds like something a computer does, not a child. But she’s sleeping better. She’s eating. She’s started talking to her friends again, carefully, in the way teenagers talk when they know something has happened but aren’t sure how much to share. She hasn’t asked me about Ross. She hasn’t asked me about what he said in the library before Alex came out of the dark, and I haven’t offered, and I don’t know if that’s the right thing or the cowardly thing, but it’s what I’m doing.

What I can’t fix is the flinching.

She flinches at sudden noises – a door slamming, a car backfiring, the bang of a cupboard in the kitchen. She flinches when someone walks up behind her. She flinched last week when I put my hand on her shoulder while she was doing homework, and the look she gave me – startled, wild, gone in a second but there – made me leave the room and cry in the bathroom with the tap running so she wouldn’t hear.

That’s on me. All of it. Every bruise on her wrists, every flinch, every session with the counsellor, every night she lies awake staring at the ceiling. I brought Ross into our lives. I opened the door when I should have locked it, answered the messages when I should have blocked them, and walked into that library with my husband just behind me. And the result is a dead man, a damaged child, and a family held together with string.

I carry it everywhere. The guilt. It’s there when I wake and there when I sleep and there when I’m standing at the sink washing Olivia’s cereal bowl and staring out at the garden where she used to do cartwheels on the grass. I don’t talk about it, because talking about it means admitting what I already know: that if I’d told the truth from the beginning – to Alex, to the police, to myself – none of this would have happened. Ross might still be alive. Olivia might still sleep with her door open. Alex might still be going to work.

But I didn’t tell the truth. I told lies, and the lies grew, and now here we are.

Alex opens the letter after Olivia leaves. He sits at the table with his reading glasses on and the envelope slit neatly along the top – even now, even with this, he uses a knife, not his finger – and he reads it in silence. I stand by the kettle, watch his face and try to read the words from his expression. His jaw tightens. His gaze moves across the page, back to the top, across again. He puts the letter down.

‘They’re still deciding,’ he says. ‘CPS haven’t made a determination yet. My solicitor says it could be another six to eight weeks.’

Six to eight weeks. Another month and a half of this – the waiting, the not knowing, the letter on the mat and the phone call that could come any day. Another month and a half of Alex sitting in this kitchen in his work shirt with nowhere to go, managing and managing and managing until the managing runs out.

‘What does your solicitor think?’ I say.

‘She thinks they won’t charge. Self-defence, defence of another, proportionate response to an immediate threat. Olivia was tied to a chair. The note proves the intent. She thinks it’ll be dropped.’

‘But she’s not sure.’

‘Nobody’s sure, Kim. A man died. Someone has to account for that.’

He folds the letter, puts it back in the envelope, and slides it to the far end of the table. His glasses come off. He slumps in his chair – and he sits like that for a while, breathing, holding himself together by the method that has kept him upright for thirty-one days. Then his hands come down, and he looks at me. His eyes are red but dry.

‘We’re going to be all right,’ he says.

I cross the kitchen and sit beside him. My chair touches his. My hand finds his on the table. His fingers close around mine, and we sit there in the quiet kitchen with the letter at the end of the table, the cereal bowls in the sink, and the clock ticking above the oven.

Something has changed between us. I’ve been trying to name it for weeks, and the closest I can get is this: we have seen each other at our worst. Not the everyday worst of a tired marriage – the bickering, the silences, the Sunday afternoons where neither of us can be bothered to try – but the real worst. The worst that involves a dead man on a library floor, a lie told to the police, and a daughter with tape on her wrists. We have seen every ugly, frightened, desperate part of each other, and we are still here. Still sitting at this table. Still holding hands.

It doesn’t feel like forgiveness. It’s too raw for that, too recent. It feels more like a decision – a mutual, unspoken agreement that whatever we are now, broken and mended and broken again, we are it together. There’s no version of this where one of us walks away. We’re bound. Not by love alone, though the love is there, battered but breathing. By what we did. By what we survived. By Olivia sleeping upstairs in a room we can both hear from the landing if we leave our door open, which we do now, every night.

I think about Ross.