Page 34 of The Friend Request

Gratitude. And absolute, marrow-deep guilt.

Because he’s sitting here offering me exactly what I need – patience, honesty, commitment, a way back in – and I’m sitting here with another man’s kiss on my conscience and a week of lies stacked up behind me, like bricks in a wall that’s already too high to see over.

Tell him.

The voice in my head is clear. Tell him now. He’s opened the door. He’s being honest. He deserves the same, and if you swallow this confession tonight, it’ll calcify inside you and become something worse – not a mistake you made but a secret you chose, and secrets are heavier than mistakes, always.

I open my mouth.

‘Alex, there’s something I need to⁠—’

‘I know it hasn’t been easy,’ he says over me, not cutting me off so much as carrying the thought forward because he’s not finished and the momentum of what he’s saying is bigger than the point I’m trying to make. ‘And I’m not pretending I’ve been perfect. I haven’t. But I’m here. I’m asking. And all I need is for you to tell me that you’re here, too.’

His eyes are shining. Alex doesn’t cry, not in front of me, not in thirteen years of marriage – but tonight his eyes are wet at the edges, and the effort it’s costing him to hold steady is written in every muscle of his face.

And I can’t do it.

I can’t sit across from this man – this decent, tired, frightened man who has just driven three hours to come home and lay himself open at his own kitchen table – and tell him that while he was worrying about our marriage, I was having dinner with my first love and kissing him by the river. And that I’ve been receiving threats I didn’t report and been chased through the dark by a man whose name I’ve kept out of our house because he’s a virus.

Not tonight. Not like this, when he’s raw and reaching and the words would land too hard, a detonation in the middle of everything he’s trying to build.

I’ll tell him. I will. But not now.

I rotate my hand under his, lace my fingers through his, and I look at him across the table with everything I have.

‘Okay,’ I say.

He squeezes my hand, and his shoulders drop. The tension in his jaw releases, just slightly, and his nod tells me he’s said the hardest thing and knows he’s been heard.

‘Okay,’ he says back. And then, softer: ‘Good.’

He comes round the table, leans down, and presses his lips against the top of my head, his hand on my shoulder. I close my eyes and breathe him in – soap, car leather, his mum’s kitchen – and just for a second, I let myself believe that okay means what it’s supposed to mean.

Then he goes upstairs to check on Olivia, his footsteps tapping on the landing and his voice floating through the bedroom door, saying something I can’t make out. And I sit alone at the kitchen table with my cold tea, and the word ‘okay’ still sitting in my mouth, a lie wrapped in cotton wool.

I should have told him.

But telling him would have ended everything he just offered, and I’m not brave enough for that. Not yet.

So instead I sit in the bright, clean kitchen, listening to my husband moving through our house, and I feel the confession settle back into its hiding place behind my ribs, heavier than it was an hour ago.

Chapter Fifteen

Cabot Circus on a Saturday afternoon is exactly what I need it to be.

Crowds. Noise. Glass ceiling three storeys high, letting in grey daylight. Escalators humming, shopping bags rustling, children whining, music bleeding out of shop doorways – the usual chaos of five hundred strangers going about their business with no interest whatsoever in a woman standing outside Marks and Spencer with her hands in her coat pockets and her heart in her throat.

He can’t make a scene here. That’s the point. That’s the whole point, and I’ve been holding on to it like a rope since I sent the message this morning – Meet me at Cabot Circus. 2 p.m. Main entrance by the escalators. Don’t call me before then. – because if I think about anything other than the location, the publicness, the sheer volume of witnesses, I’ll lose my nerve and go home.

I got here early. Forty minutes early, because I needed to walk the space and get my bearings, to map the exits in my head the way you’d check the fire escapes in a hotel. I know where the doors are, which corridors lead to car parks and which lead to more shops. I know that if I keep moving, keep turning, keep threading through the Saturday crowds, there is nowhere in this building where Ross Mercer can corner me.

That’s the theory anyway.

My phone buzzes. A text from Alex: Taken Liv to the cinema. Back around 5. Leftover pasta in the fridge if you’re hungry x

I type back: Thanks, enjoy the film x

Normal. Ordinary. A wife replying to her husband on a Saturday afternoon while she stands in a shopping centre waiting for the man who chased her through the dark a week ago. My hands are clammy against the phone screen. I wipe them on my jeans, put the phone in my bag, and glance up at the escalators.