Page 38 of The Friend Request

‘Cereal, Liv.’

She pours herself a bowl of something chocolatey and sits at the table with her phone propped against the milk carton, watching a video with the sound tinny and too loud. I don’t tell her to turn it down because the noise is welcome, the normality of it, the thirteen-year-old-on-a-Sunday-morning ordinariness.

Alex mows the lawn after lunch. The mower coughs to life in the garden, and I watch him through the kitchen window, pushing it back and forth in careful lines, pausing to pull a stick out of the blades, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Olivia is in her room. The house smells of clean sheets and the roast I’ve put in for later, lamb with rosemary, Alex’s favourite, a peace offering disguised as a Sunday dinner.

By three o’clock, I’ve almost convinced myself.

It’s over. Ross got the message. The account is blocked, the words are said, the line is drawn. He’ll go back to wherever he came from – wherever he’s been for the last twenty years – and I’ll stay here, in this house, with this family, and we’ll mend the cracks and fill the silences and be fine. Better than fine. We’ll be what we were before he came back, or close enough that the difference won’t show.

I believe it. I need to believe it. And for a few bright, fragile hours on a Sunday afternoon, with lamb in the oven and clean sheets on the beds and my husband’s mower droning in the garden, I do.

My phone buzzes at ten past three.

I’m standing at the kitchen worktop, chopping carrots. The knife is in my right hand, the chopping board is wet, and my phone is on the worktop beside me, face up, because I stopped hiding it from Alex this morning as part of the new regime – the open, honest, nothing-to-see-here version of myself that I’m building from the ground up.

The screen lights. A notification banner slides down from the top.

Text message from Unknown Number.

My hand stills. The knife remains in the carrot, the blade pressed into the flesh without pushing through. I stare at the notification with a feeling I can only describe as tilt – the floor shifting beneath me, the kitchen rearranging itself around a new centre of gravity.

It’s nothing. It’s a spam message. PPI, a delivery notification, or one of those automated texts from the dentist reminding me to book a check-up. I get them all the time. Everyone gets them.

I put down the knife. I pick up the phone and tap the notification.

The message opens.

My eyes track across the words once, quickly, the way you scan a headline before your brain registers what it says. Then they track back to the beginning and read it again, slower this time, each word arriving separately, like stones dropped into still water.

You don’t get to walk away from me, you fucking bitch.

The kitchen goes very quiet.

Not actually quiet – the oven is still humming, the mower is still droning outside, the clock is still ticking above the cooker. But something in my head has gone quiet, a sudden vacuum, as though my brain has thrown a switch and sealed off everything except the words on the screen in front of me.

I read it again.

You don’t get to walk away from me, you fucking bitch.

My hands are shaking, vibrating from the shoulder down, the phone rattling against my fingers. I grip it tighter, and the shaking gets worse, spreading into my chest, my jaw, the backs of my knees.

The mower stops outside. Alex swears then it starts again, the steady back-and-forth hum resuming as though nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed for him. He’s out there mowing the lawn in his old trainers with grass clippings on his shins, thinking about the roast and the rugby scores and whether the fence post needs replacing before winter. He doesn’t know. He can’t feel what I’m feeling, this sick cold spreading through my chest and down into my stomach, this taste in my mouth like metal and old pennies, this absolute certainty that the wall I built this morning was made of paper and Ross Mercer has just put his fist through it.

He found another way.

I said the words to his face in a public place. I blocked every account. I closed every channel, and then I came home and shut the last digital door, and I thought – I genuinely, stupidly thought – that would be enough.

It wasn’t enough. He has my number. I don’t know how – I never gave it to him, not the new one, not this phone – but he has it, and he’s used it, and the message sitting on my screen is so far from the wounded, confused man who stood in Cabot Circus yesterday with his arms at his sides and his face falling apart that I feel dizzy trying to reconcile the two.

You don’t get to walk away from me.

As though I belong to him. As though walking away is something I need his permission for.

You fucking bitch.

I’ve never heard Ross swear like that. Not at me, not at anyone. Even as a teenager, even when he was angry, he kept his language clean, clipped, controlled – the words always chosen, never spat. This doesn’t sound like him. This sounds like someone else. Someone I haven’t met yet.