Page 37 of The Friend Request

Chapter Sixteen

The first thing I do on Sunday morning is block him.

The blank profile, the faceless square, the account he made to reach me after I’d shut the first door. I find it in my message requests, tap the three dots in the corner, and press block. A confirmation box appears: Are you sure you want to block this user?

Yes. God, yes.

I press confirm, and the conversation vanishes. The screen refreshes, and the blank profile is gone, wiped from my inbox as though it never existed. I stare at the empty space where it used to be, and something shifts inside me. A loosening. A knot that’s been pulled tight for weeks giving half a turn in the right direction.

I put the phone down on the kitchen worktop and pick up my tea. It’s barely seven. The house is quiet – Alex asleep upstairs, Olivia dead to the world in her room with her door closed and curtains drawn, the Sunday-morning stillness that I used to love and have spent the last fortnight dreading because silence gives my brain too much room.

But today the silence feels different. Today it feels earned.

I told him to leave me alone, now I’ve blocked him, and those two things together – the words and the action – feel like a wall. Not a locked car door, or a crowded shopping centre, or the chain across the front door at night, but something bigger. A line drawn. A decision made and followed through. For the first time since that friend request appeared on my screen, I have done something instead of reacting to something, and it feels good.

I carry my tea to the kitchen table and sit down. The morning light is coming through the window above the sink – pale, thin, the washed-out grey of winter – and the garden beyond is wet with dew, the grass long enough that Alex will mention the mower later, the fence at the back leaning where the post rotted through last winter. Ordinary things. My things.

I sip my tea and breathe, letting the ordinary press in around me.

Yesterday I said everything I needed to say.

And he stood there and took it.

That’s the part I keep coming back to, even though I don’t want to. The way his face crumbled. The rawness behind his eyes when I said you had your chance, and you lost it. The step he took towards me that I matched with a step backwards, and the way his arms stayed at his sides, palms open, as though he was physically stopping himself from reaching for me.

I push the image away. It doesn’t matter how he looked or what he felt. What matters is that I said the words, then I walked away, came home, and blocked his account. And now the channels are closed. Facebook gone. No phone number exchanged. No email, no address, no mutual friends who might pass a message on. The only way Ross Mercer can reach me now is by turning up in person, and after yesterday – after standing in a public place and hearing me tell him plainly to leave me alone – surely even he wouldn’t do that.

Would he?

Stop it. Don’t go there. Don’t pick at the wall five minutes after building it.

I wipe down the worktop even though it doesn’t need wiping, unload the dishwasher and put everything away in the right cupboards. The small domestic rhythm of folding the tea towel and hanging it over the oven handle steadies me the way it always has – hands busy, brain quiet, the world reduced to cups and plates and the satisfying clink of things being put where they belong.

By the time Alex comes downstairs at half eight, I’m almost calm.

‘Morning.’ He’s rumpled, yawning, in joggers and a T-shirt, his hair sticking up at the back. He goes straight to the kettle. ‘Sleep all right?’

‘Not bad, actually. Better than I have done.’

He glances at me. One of the quick, assessing looks he’s been giving me since Friday night when we sat at this table and he told me he loved me. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’

‘Is Olivia up?’

‘Not a chance. I stuck my head in. She’s got the duvet over her face and the curtains are shut. We’ve got an hour at least.’

He makes his tea and sits opposite me. For a few minutes, we exist in the comfortable, unremarkable silence of two people who’ve been married long enough to share a kitchen without needing to fill it with words. Alex scrolls through something on his phone. I stare at the garden. The fridge hums. The boiler clicks.

This is what I nearly lost. This is what I’m fighting to keep.

I spend the morning doing the things I would normally do on a Sunday. Laundry – the basket has been overflowing for three days, and I sort it on the utility room floor, lights and darks, checking pockets for tissues and coins. Olivia’s school shirt has a stain on the collar that won’t shift without a soak, so I fill the sink and leave it. I hoover the living room. I strip the beds and put fresh sheets on, wrestling with the duvet cover, one corner first, shake, swear under my breath, try again.

Normal. All of it. Tediously, beautifully normal.

Olivia surfaces around ten and stands in the kitchen doorway with her hair in a bird’s nest and her pyjama bottoms trailing under her heels. ‘Can I have pancakes?’

‘There’s cereal.’

‘But it’s Sunday.’