Page 3 of The Friend Request

My stomach drops.

I stare at the screen. The kitchen tap is dripping somewhere behind me, a faint rhythmic plink I hadn’t noticed until now. The house feels too big and too quiet, and my tea has gone cold again in my hand.

Ross Mercer.

I read it again. Ross Mercer. The profile picture is small, a man in a dark coat, face half turned away from the camera, but I know. I know the way I’d know my own handwriting.

My hands are shaking.

I haven’t read that name in years. Haven’t said it out loud in longer than that. And here it is, sitting on my phone screen at half eight on a Monday morning in my cluttered little office with the candle-scented curtains and the view of next door’s garage, as if it’s nothing. As if he’s just someone from the past who fancies reconnecting.

But Ross Mercer doesn’t reconnect. Ross Mercer disappeared. One day he was there – in the corridor, in the library, pressed close in the dark with his mouth on mine – and the next he was gone. No note. No explanation. No goodbye. Just an empty desk, a phone that stopped ringing, and a seventeen-year-old girl who spent the next six months waiting for someone who was never coming back.

I put my phone down, screen up, and grip the table until my fingers go white.

He’s found me.

After all this time, Ross Mercer has found me.

I pick up the phone again. I should close the app. I should put it away, open the design files, get on with my day, and treat this like what it probably is – a random click, a bored afternoon, a man clearing out old names and adding anyone he half remembers. People do that. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

But my thumb is hovering over his name, my pulse is loud in my ears, the kitchen tap keeps dripping, and the house is so quiet I can hear my own breathing.

I tell myself it’s nothing.

I don’t believe a word of it.

Chapter Two

It’s still there when I wake up the next morning.

I lie in bed, listening to Alex in the bathroom, the tap running, the soft thud of the cabinet door. Routine morning sounds. Safe sounds. But my mind isn’t in this room. It’s on my phone, and on the little notification I didn’t open, didn’t accept, didn’t delete.

Ross Mercer wants to be friends.

I sit up and push my hair out of my face. The bedroom is grey with early light, the curtains not meeting in the middle. Olivia’s alarm is going off down the hall – that tinny, awful song she’s chosen as her ringtone, playing on a loop because she sleeps through the first four rounds every single morning. I should go and bang on her door. I should get up, put the kettle on, start the packed lunch, find her PE kit, do all the things I always do. But I sit with my hands in my lap and think about a name I haven’t seen in twenty years, glowing on a screen in the dark.

I didn’t accept it. That’s the important thing.

I told myself last night that I’d sleep on it, and sleeping on it would make the whole thing shrink back to what it actually is – nothing. An old school friend, a social media request, something that happens to everyone. People reconnect. People look up the names they used to know. It doesn’t mean anything.

So why is my pulse doing something odd in my throat?

Alex comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, already half-dressed in his head, already thinking about work. He nods at me like I’m someone he’s passing in a corridor and opens the wardrobe.

‘Olivia’s alarm,’ I say.

‘I can hear it.’

‘Are you going to⁠—?’

‘I’ve got to be in early,’ he says. ‘Can you sort her out?’

I can always sort her out. That’s my job, apparently. Sorting out is what I do, while Alex puts on a clean shirt and drives to an office where people call him Mr Stiller and bring him coffee and listen when he talks.

I push the duvet off and go to wake Olivia.

She’s face down in her pillow, one arm dangling off the side of the bed, her phone blaring three inches from her ear. I turn it off and sit on the edge of the mattress.