Page 14 of The Friend Request

‘Once. I climbed through it once, and I scraped my knee on the frame and spent the rest of the evening convinced Mr Davies was going to find the blood and have it tested.’

‘You genuinely thought the school was going to run a DNA analysis on a scraped knee?’

‘I was fifteen. I didn’t know how forensics worked. I just knew I was going to get caught and expelled, and my mum would never speak to me again.’

Ross laughs, and the sound carries across the water. ‘And instead, nothing happened.’

‘Nothing happened because you went back the next morning and wiped the frame with your sleeve.’

‘I did, didn’t I?’ He’s smiling now, the way he used to when it was just us and nobody else was watching. ‘God. We were so careful. All that sneaking around, all those coded notes, all that panic about someone finding out. Like we were running some sort of covert operation instead of just⁠—’

‘Being teenagers who fancied each other.’

‘Yeah.’

We walk in silence for a few steps. The bridge is ahead of us, lit orange, with a couple crossing from the other side, arms linked, heads down against the mist.

‘It feels a bit like that tonight,’ I say quietly.

Ross glances at me. ‘Like what?’

‘Like being teenagers. Hiding something. Taking the long way around so nobody sees us.’

He nods slowly. ‘Except we’re not teenagers.’

‘No.’

‘And you’re married.’

‘Yes. I’m married.’ I say it firmly, as though stating it out loud might strengthen my resolve. ‘And this isn’t – whatever this is, it isn’t that. It’s not a secret relationship. It’s two old friends having dinner.’

‘Is that what we are? Old friends?’

‘What else would we be?’

He doesn’t answer. We cross the bridge and turn on to the side street that leads to the car park. The noise of the traffic fades behind us, and the street narrows, terraced houses on one side, a high wall on the other, and suddenly it’s very quiet and very dark, and the only sound is our footsteps.

Ross stops.

I stop, too, a half-step ahead of him, and turn. He’s standing under a street light that makes his face look pale and angular, his eyes darker than they are, the mist beading on the shoulders of his coat.

‘Can I ask you something?’ he says.

‘Depends what it is.’

‘What would happen if we weren’t sensible?’

The question hangs in the air. My pulse kicks up, and it thuds in my wrists, my throat, the backs of my knees. The street is empty. The houses are dark. Somewhere a cat crosses the pavement and disappears under a parked car. The silence that follows feels enormous.

‘What do you mean?’ I say, though I know exactly what he means.

‘I mean—’ He takes a breath, runs a hand through his damp hair, and stares at me with an expression I haven’t seen since we were sitting side by side in that library with the rain against the windows and the whole world shut out. ‘I mean, what if we stopped pretending this is just two old friends having dinner? What would that look like?’

‘Ross—’

‘I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just asking the question.’

My mouth is dry. My heart is pounding. I should say something sensible like, It would look like a disaster. It would mean my marriage falling apart, my daughter’s life turned upside down, and everything I’ve built for the last fourteen years burning to the ground. That’s what it would look like.