Page 87 of The Friend Request

I think about him more than I should, and less than I used to, and in a different way. The boy I loved is gone – he was gone long before that night in the library, if I’m honest. He was gone the day he vanished without saying goodbye, and what came back in his place was something else: a man shaped by the same wound I carried, but twisted by it in ways I couldn’t see because I was too busy seeing the boy. I wanted him to be the Ross I remembered. I wanted the first love, the library kiss, the window in the dark. And because I wanted it, I missed everything that should have frightened me – the messages, the showing up, the way he always knew where I was, the brick through the window of a cottage.

He said I was wrong about what happened at the cottage. In the library, seconds before Alex came out of the shadows, Ross looked at me with something on his face I still can’t put away – confusion, fury, hurt – and said I was wrong. I don’t know what he meant, or if it even matters now. What I know is that a man who ties a thirteen-year-old girl to a chair to force her mother into a conversation is not a man I can mourn in the way I want to. I can mourn the boy. I can mourn what we had and what we lost and the years of silence that ate us both from the inside. But the man who stood in that library with my daughter bound and gagged behind him – I can’t grieve for him without lying to myself again, and I’m done with lying.

So I let him go. Not all at once, and not cleanly. But in small pieces, the way you let go of anything that mattered too much for too long. I close the door I should have closed years ago, and I turn the lock, and walk away.

Alex squeezes my hand. Outside, the sky over Keynsham is grey. Somewhere out there, Olivia is walking through the school gates with her sleeves pulled down and her bag on her shoulder. She is brave, she is mine, and she is alive.

Whatever comes next – the CPS, the investigation, the charge or the relief of no charge – we’ll face it from this table, in this kitchen, in this house. The three of us.

That’s the only thing I’m sure of now.

It’s enough.

Epilogue

The email arrives at six in the morning.

I’m awake because I’m always awake at six now – something broke in my sleep pattern the night of the school and hasn’t mended. I lie in the dark and listen to Alex breathing and wait for the light to come through the curtains. When my phone buzzes on the bedside table, I pick it up without thinking, the way you pick up anything that interrupts the silence.

The sender is a name I don’t recognise. A woman. The subject line is two words: Ross Mercer.

I sit up in bed. My thumb hovers over the screen. Alex shifts beside me, rolls on to his side, settles. I should put the phone down. I should leave it until I’ve had coffee, until I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the daylight on my face and the kettle boiled. But my thumb is already moving, the email is already open, and the first line is already in my head.

My name is Catherine Mercer. Ross was my brother. I have something you need to see before the police and the press see it.

My blood goes cold.

I read the rest standing in the bathroom with the door locked and the shower running so Alex can’t hear me if I make a sound. Catherine Mercer. I’d forgotten Ross had a sister. I’d filed it in the part of my memory I don’t visit. She writes plainly, without emotion, the way someone writes when they’ve rehearsed it so many times the feeling has been sanded off. She says Ross left a package with her before the night at the school – a hard drive, a USB stick, printed screenshots, and a video he recorded on his phone. She says he told her: If anything happens to me, send this to everyone. She says she’s spent the last month deciding whether to do it.

She’s decided.

The package has already gone to his solicitor and police. The email to me is, she says, a courtesy. She wants me to know what’s coming before it arrives.

There’s a link at the bottom. A cloud folder, password-protected. The password is in the email.

I click it.

The folder opens, and my legs go weak. I sit down on the edge of the bath and scroll. With every file I open, the bathroom gets smaller, the air gets thinner, and the sound of the shower becomes a roar that fills my skull.

Screenshots. Dozens of them. Messages between me and Ross, every exchange, timestamped and dated. But not just our messages – screenshots from accounts that sent explicit photographs and messages so vile I can barely read them. And beside each one, metadata. IP logs. Device information. Traces that lead back, link by link, to a single source.

Me.

The phone nearly slides into the bath. I grip it with both hands and keep scrolling. There are more screenshots – my messages to Ross from the early weeks, the ones I sent late at night when Alex was asleep, the ones where I pushed and pushed for another meeting, another drink, another hour alone. I remember writing them. I remember the heat of it, the thrill, the sense that I was reclaiming something that had been taken from me. And I remember what happened when Ross pulled back – the polite refusal, the careful distance, the message that said Kim, I think we should leave this where it is – and the fury that came after.

The fury I told myself was fear.

And there is CCTV. A video file from a security camera on the side street near the restaurant where we had dinner. The clip is grainy, timestamped, and unmistakable. It shows Ross walking away after the kiss. It shows me standing on the pavement for three or four seconds. And then it shows me running after him – actually running, my coat flapping, my bag swinging – catching his arm and pulling him back and pressing my mouth against his. He steps away. I step towards him. He holds up his hands, palms out, the universal gesture for stop, and I stand there on the dark street with my arms at my sides and my head bowed, and then I walk away. The whole thing takes eleven seconds. Eleven seconds that prove everything I told Alex about that night was a lie.

My stomach turns over. I close my eyes, open them again, and the footage is still there, still playing on a loop. The homeowner promised me he’d wiped it. I stood in his doorway two days after the dinner and asked him, calmly, politely, whether the camera on the side of his house recorded to a hard drive or to the cloud, and when he said hard drive, I took a copy then offered him two hundred pounds to delete the last week’s footage. He took the money. He looked me in the eye and said it was done. And somehow Ross got hold of it anyway – went to the same house, asked the same questions, or maybe the man kept a copy, or maybe there was a second camera I didn’t see. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that it exists, that the police and Ross’s solicitor already have it, and that by lunchtime the press will have it, too.

There’s a video file at the bottom of the folder. It’s twenty-three minutes long. The thumbnail shows Ross sitting at a table in what looks like a kitchen. His face is drawn, his eyes are tired, and he’s staring directly at the camera.

I press play.

‘My name is Ross Mercer,’ he says. Quietly. Steadily. Like he’s thought about every word before saying it. ‘If you’re watching this, something has happened to me. I don’t know what. I hope nothing has. But I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling like the ground is being pulled out from under me, and I want there to be a record of what actually happened, in my own words, in case I don’t get the chance to say it later.’

He pauses. Rubs his face with both hands. Takes a breath.