Page 21 of The Friend Request

It crossed my mind that someone else could be doing this, but it has to be Ross. The photograph, the screenshots, the cold little threat dressed up as a message request from a blank profile – who else could it be? He has the messages because they’re his. He knows where we stood on that street because he was standing there, too. And the security footage – any camera on that row of terraced houses could have caught us, and Ross would know that, because Ross was the one who stopped walking, Ross was the one who turned to face me under the street light, Ross was the one who put his hand on my jaw and kissed me while a camera recorded it from above.

He planned it.

The thought hits me while I’m standing at the kitchen sink, and I grip the edge of the worktop so hard my knuckles ache. He planned the whole thing. The dinner, the walk, the kiss on the dark street – all of it designed to give him something he could use. Something he could hold over me.

But why?

That’s the part I can’t make sense of. The Ross I knew as a teenager wouldn’t have done this. The Ross I sat across from in the restaurant last week – laughing about Mr Fenton, telling me about Portugal, smiling that lopsided smile – didn’t seem like a man building a trap. He seemed kind. He seemed genuine. He seemed like someone who wanted to be near me for the simple, human reason that we’d once meant something to each other.

And maybe that’s what makes it worse. Because I believed him. I sat there drinking wine, dredging up old memories, and believed every word. And now I’m standing in my kitchen with a blackmail message on my phone and no idea who I actually had dinner with.

I could tell Alex.

The thought surfaces around mid-morning, while Olivia is upstairs and Alex is in the living room reading something on his laptop. I stand in the hallway and look at him through the open door – his profile against the window, the light catching the grey flecks in his hair, his reading glasses on, his mouth slightly open the way it always is when he’s concentrating – and I think about going in and sitting down and saying, Alex, I need to tell you something.

I picture his face. The way it would change. The confusion first, then the hurt, then the anger – slow, controlled, devastating, because Alex doesn’t shout. He goes quiet. He asks questions in a voice so level it sounds like he’s cross-examining a witness, and every answer you give makes it worse, and by the end you wish he had shouted, because the silence is so much harder to bear.

I picture telling him about the dinner. The walk. The kiss. I picture the word ‘Ross’ in my mouth and the way Alex would hear it – not as a name but as a verdict. Evidence that his wife has been lying, sneaking around, meeting another man in restaurants and strolling with him along rivers and kissing him on dark streets while their daughter sleeps at home.

And then I picture the fragile, tentative warmth of the last few days – the family dinners, the film on the sofa, Olivia asleep between us, Alex’s hand on my waist outside her bedroom door, him saying This has been a good week – and I feel the whole thing crack like ice under a boot.

I can’t.

If I tell Alex now, I’ll lose everything I’ve been trying to rebuild. The progress, the closeness, the tiny green shoots pushing through the mess of the last few months. He won’t see them as real. He’ll see them as guilt, which they partly are, but not entirely, not completely, because some of it – the dinners, the conversations, the effort – has been real. I’ve felt it. Sitting on the sofa with Olivia’s head on my shoulder, I felt it. Standing in her doorway, watching her sleep, I felt it. And if I tell Alex, he’ll take all of that warmth and reframe it as performance, and maybe he’d be right, but I can’t let him, because if this family falls apart it needs to be for a better reason than one stupid kiss on a wet pavement.

So I don’t tell him.

I make lunch instead. Soup from a tin, bread from the freezer, cheese sliced thick because Olivia likes it that way. We eat together at the kitchen table, and Alex talks about the case he’s working on – something dull and complicated involving a boundary dispute and two neighbours who haven’t spoken in four years – and I nod and ask questions and laugh when he does the voices, and it’s fine. It’s normal. It’s exactly the kind of Saturday lunchtime I used to take for granted before Ross Mercer walked back into my life and set fire to it.

After lunch, Olivia goes to Mia’s. Alex drives her. I wave them off from the front door, standing on the step in my socks with my arms folded against the cold, and the moment the car rounds the corner, I go back inside and take out my phone and look at the message again.

Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.

I stare at it. I read it four, five, six times, searching the words for some crack, some angle, some way to interpret them that doesn’t make me feel like the walls are closing in. Meet me again. As if it’s an invitation. As if the threat is an afterthought, a nudge, a gentle reminder that he holds all the cards and I hold nothing.

What does he want? If it’s money, I don’t have any – not the kind you’d blackmail someone for anyway. If it’s me, if it’s the relationship he’s trying to restart, then the blackmail makes no sense, because you can’t threaten someone into loving you. You can’t hold a photograph over a woman’s head and expect her to fall into your arms.

Unless he doesn’t care about love. Unless he cares about control.

My phone feels hot in my hand. I lock the screen, drop it on the table, and walk to the other end of the kitchen. Then I walk to the window and look out at the garden – the fence, the lawn, the trampoline Olivia barely uses any more, the shed with the peeling paint – and I press my forehead against the glass and close my eyes.

I should block this account, too. Delete the message, block the profile, pretend I never saw it. When I did that with Ross’s real account, I got three days of something that almost felt like peace.

But this is different. Because this account has a photograph of me kissing a man who is not my husband, and screenshots of messages that prove I lied, and if I block it, whoever is behind it – Ross, it’s Ross, who else could it be? – might send everything to Alex out of spite.

The thought makes my blood run cold.

I leave the message where it is. Unanswered. Sitting in my inbox, a bomb with the pin halfway out. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll think about it later. Right now, I need to get through the rest of the day without falling apart, and that means cleaning the house, because cleaning the house is the only thing I can do when my brain won’t stop spinning and I need to feel like I’m in control of something, even if it’s just the state of the bathroom tiles.

I clean for two hours. Hoover the stairs, scrub the kitchen floor, polish the mirrors, sort the recycling, empty the bins, change the sheets on our bed. Physical, mindless work that lets me move without thinking, my body going through the motions while my mind circles the same sick loop – the photograph, the message, the kiss, the lie, the photograph, the message, the kiss.

Alex comes home with Olivia around four. They bring cake from the bakery on the high street – lemon drizzle, my favourite, because Olivia chose it – and we sit in the kitchen and eat it with cups of tea, and Olivia tells us about Mia’s new puppy, a cockapoo called Biscuit who chewed through a phone charger and got sick on the landing. We laugh, and the kitchen feels warm, and I think: This is what I’m protecting. This. Right here. This ordinary, imperfect, precious thing.

The afternoon bleeds into evening. Alex makes dinner. I load the dishwasher. Olivia watches something on her iPad with her headphones in, sprawled on the sofa with her feet up on the armrest, and the house ticks along the way houses do when everyone is home, nobody is fighting, the doors are locked and the lights are on.

I go upstairs to make the bed.

I stripped and washed the sheets this morning, and now they’re dry and warm from the airing cupboard. I spread the fitted sheet over the mattress, tuck the corners in, and reach for the duvet cover. The room is quiet except for the soft thump of fabric and the faint sound of the television downstairs. I’m smoothing the pillowcases when it hits me.