Page 20 of The Friend Request

On Saturday morning, I wake up to sunlight through the curtains and the sound of Olivia arguing with Alex about whether she’s allowed to have her phone at breakfast. I lie there, gaze on the ceiling, letting the sounds of everyday life wash over me – the kettle boiling, Alex’s voice low and patient, Olivia’s voice high and indignant, the radio on in the background playing something I half recognise. Normal. All of it. Beautifully, boringly normal.

I pick up my phone from the bedside table.

There’s a Facebook notification.

My stomach drops before my brain has even caught up, a cold wash of dread running from my throat to my knees. I unlock the screen and open the app. A friend request. From an account I don’t recognise – no mutual friends, no posts, no cover photo. The profile picture is small, a thumbnail, and I have to tap on it to enlarge it, and when I do, the room tilts.

It’s me and Ross.

On the street. In the dark. His hand on my jaw, my face tilted up, our mouths pressed together. The image is grainy and slightly blue, the angle high and wide, and it takes me a second to understand what I’m looking at – security footage, a camera mounted on one of the terraced houses or the wall opposite, capturing the moment in flat, colourless detail. My coat. His dark jumper. The street light above us. The wet pavement beneath our feet.

My blood goes cold.

I sit up in bed. My hands are trembling so hard the phone rattles against my fingers, and I can hear my own breathing, fast and shallow, filling the quiet of the bedroom. I tap through to the message that came with the request.

There are screenshots. Three of them. Our Facebook messages – mine and Ross’s – cropped and arranged in a sequence that makes them look worse than they are. His messages about wanting to talk. My earlier replies, from before I blocked him, the brief, cautious ones – I know. I’m just not sure this is a good idea, and I think about it, too – pulled out of context and lined up to look like a woman deep in an affair, not a woman trying to end one that barely started.

Below the screenshots, a single message.

Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.

The room swims. I read it again. And again. The words stay the same, blunt and flat and terrible, sitting on my screen, a bomb with the timer already running.

I close the app. Open it. Close it. My mouth is dry, and there’s a ringing in my ears. I might throw up right here in my bed, while my husband makes tea downstairs and my daughter argues about screen time and the sun comes in through the curtains as if this is just another Saturday morning.

It isn’t.

I get up, go to the bathroom, lock the door, sit on the edge of the bath, and stare at the phone in my hands. The profile has no name I recognise. No identifying features. Just the photograph, me and Ross frozen in mid-kiss as though evidence in a trial – and the screenshots, and the message.

Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.

Why would Ross do this to me? Why would he go to all the effort of securing a grainy photo and rearranging the screenshots just to torment me? It was him who ruined my life all those years ago, not the other way around. Was he planning this all along?

The thought makes me feel sick. I wrap my arms around myself and press my back against the cold tile of the bathroom wall and try to think, but my brain is moving too fast, skidding over the surface of the panic without getting purchase.

‘Kim?’ Alex calling from the landing. ‘Coffee’s ready. Are you coming down?’

I close my eyes and breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, the way the anxiety app told me to, then I stand up and look at myself in the mirror. Pale. Dark circles. A woman who hasn’t slept properly in a week.

‘Coming,’ I call back, and I sound normal. Like a woman whose biggest problem this morning is deciding between toast and cereal.

I put the phone in the pocket of my dressing gown, and I go downstairs.

Alex hands me a mug. Olivia is eating cereal and scrolling through her phone with one hand. The kitchen is warm, the radio is playing, and everything is the same as it was five minutes ago.

But the phone in my pocket feels as if it weighs a stone. And the message is still there, waiting behind the locked screen, patient and sharp and impossible to ignore.

Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.

I drink my coffee, smile at my daughter, and I don’t say a word.

Chapter Nine

I spend the morning pretending I’m fine.

It’s what I’m good at, apparently. Smiling when my stomach is in pieces. Pouring cereal, wiping surfaces, answering Olivia’s questions about whether she can go to Mia’s house later – ‘Yes, fine, just text me when you get there’ – while the phone in my dressing gown pocket throbs like a second heartbeat.

Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.