Page 22 of The Friend Request

A feeling. Not a sound. Not a movement. Just a feeling, sudden and physical, like a cold hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.

Someone is watching me.

I freeze. My fingers stop on the pillowcase, and my whole body goes still, every nerve pulling tight. The silence in the bedroom turns from ordinary to wrong. I can feel it – eyes, attention, focus – coming from behind me, from the direction of the window, and my skin prickles from the base of my spine to the back of my skull.

I turn around.

The curtains are open. The window is a black rectangle, reflecting the bedroom back at me – the lamp, the bed, my own pale face staring out from the glass. Beyond the reflection, the garden is dark. The fence, the shed, the trampoline are all shapes without detail, edges without colour, and the sky above them is flat and starless.

There’s nothing there.

I stand and stare at the window for five seconds, ten, fifteen, scanning the darkness for movement, for a shape, for the outline of a figure standing in the garden or on the path, or beyond the fence. I see nothing. The garden is empty. The street beyond it is quiet. There is nobody watching me through the glass.

But the feeling doesn’t leave me.

I cross the room and pull the curtains shut, fast, gripping the fabric so hard my knuckles go white, and I stand there with the curtains closed and my heart hammering and my breath coming in short, tight bursts, and I tell myself I’m being ridiculous. I’m being paranoid. I’ve spent the day stewing in anxiety and guilt and fear, and now my brain is inventing threats to match my mood. There is nobody in the garden, nobody on the street, nobody watching me through the window of my own bedroom.

Nobody.

I smooth the duvet and straighten the pillows. I pick up the dirty washing basket from the corner of the room and carry it to the landing. Downstairs, I put the dirty clothes in the machine, add a liquid pod, close the door, and press the button. The machine shudders into life, and I lean against it and breathe.

‘All right?’ Alex says from the kitchen doorway.

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Just tired.’

‘You look pale.’

‘I’m always pale. It’s November.’

He smiles a small, tired smile and goes back to the kitchen. I stand in the utility room with the washing machine humming against my back, my hands gripping the edge of it, and I close my eyes and try to convince myself that this is manageable. That the message is just words. That the photograph is just pixels. That the feeling upstairs was just my imagination, just stress, just the natural consequence of spending an entire day with a threat sitting unanswered in my pocket.

But when I go back upstairs twenty minutes later to brush my teeth, I check the curtains are still closed.

They are.

And I check the window latch.

Twice.

Chapter Ten

The typing dots are the worst part.

I wake up on Monday to a grey sky pressing against the bedroom window and Alex already gone – his side of the bed cool, his pillow dented, the faint smell of shower gel and toothpaste still hanging in the air. Olivia is downstairs. I can hear the television, the clink of a cereal bowl, and the muffled thud of her school bag hitting the floor. For a few seconds I just lie there, staring at the ceiling, letting the sounds of normal life hold me in place.

Then I pick up my phone.

One notification. Facebook. The little red circle sits in the corner of the app like a spot of blood on a clean sheet, and my stomach drops before I’ve even opened it.

The blank profile. The account with no name, no cover photo, no friends – just the security-camera image of me and Ross kissing on a dark street in Bristol, still sitting there as the profile picture, a trophy on a shelf.

A new message.

We need to talk.

Four words. No threat this time, no mention of Alex, no deadline. Just the statement, as if the blackmail message from last week was a perfectly normal way to open a conversation and now we’re moving on to the next stage.

I sit up. My hands are cold, my jaw tight, and my pulse hammers in the soft hollow of my throat. I read the message again. We need to talk. As if we’re old colleagues who’ve had a misunderstanding. As if he hasn’t sent me photographs of my infidelity and threatened to forward them to my husband.