Page 39 of The Friend Request

Or someone I’ve been refusing to see.

I lock the phone and slide it across the worktop, away from me, as though the distance will stop the words from being real. Then I stand at the chopping board with the knife in my hand and the half-cut carrot in front of me, stare at the wall, and try to breathe. I can’t. My lungs won’t expand properly, my ribs feel like a cage that’s shrunk two sizes, and the air is right there, but I can’t get it in.

The back door opens.

‘Kim?’ Alex, wiping his boots on the mat. ‘Have we got any bin bags? The green bin’s overflowing, and I need to⁠—’

‘Under the sink.’ I sound wrong, the words pushed through a space that’s too narrow.

He crosses the kitchen behind me. I hear the cupboard open, the rustle of the bin-bag roll, the cupboard closing. He pauses. I can feel him behind me, not touching, just standing there, and I know he’s noticed something – my posture, the knife motionless on the board, the rigid set of my shoulders – because Alex always notices. He just doesn’t always ask.

‘You all right?’

‘Fine. Just tired.’

A beat. Then: ‘Right. I’ll finish up outside.’

The back door closes. The mower starts again.

I pick up the phone. I read the message one more time, slowly, letting every word sink in. Then I lock it, slide it into my pocket, and pick up the knife and finish cutting the carrots. My hands are trembling so badly that I nick my thumb on the blade, and a thin line of blood wells up along the skin and drips on to the chopping board, red against orange.

I rinse it under the tap, wrap a plaster around it, and carry on.

Because that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Carry on, keep moving, act normally, smile when someone walks in, say fine when someone asks. And behind the smile, behind the fine, behind the plaster on the thumb and the lamb in the oven and the clean sheets on the beds, the words sit in my pocket and pulse like a second heartbeat.

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

He isn’t finished.

Chapter Seventeen

Something has shifted.

It’s been four days since the text from Ross, and I’ve barely slept through any of them. But I’m determined this won’t break me, won’t break the tentative steps Alex and I are taking to get things back on track. This morning I wake up and Alex is still in bed beside me, his arm heavy across my waist, and I don’t move it. I lie there and listen to him breathe. This is what I chose. This is what I have. And despite the message sitting on my phone, I relax enough to take a full breath.

I make the decision before I even get up. I’m going to try. Properly try, not the half-hearted motions I’ve been going through where I say the right things but my head is somewhere else. Alex told me he wanted us to talk more, to stop orbiting each other like strangers who share a mortgage, and I nodded and said yes, and then I carried on exactly as before because Ross was taking up every spare inch of space in my brain.

Not any more.

I get up first and put the coffee on, then unload the dishwasher because it’s Alex’s least favourite job and he always does it without complaining. The kitchen is quiet and grey with early light, and I move through it softly, mugs on to the shelf, plates stacked, the small satisfaction of putting things back where they belong. When Alex comes downstairs in his work shirt, sleeves rolled up, hair still damp, I hand him a mug, and he looks at me like I’ve done something remarkable.

It breaks my heart a bit, that handing my husband a cup of coffee counts as remarkable.

But I smile, and he smiles back, and neither of us ruins it by saying anything too big.

‘Olivia’s got that geography project due,’ he says, leaning against the worktop. ‘Did she finish it?’

‘She says she has. Whether that means she’s actually finished it or she’s done two paragraphs and a title page is anyone’s guess.’

He laughs. ‘I’ll check it tonight.’

‘She’ll love that.’

‘She’ll hate it,’ he says. ‘But she’ll get a decent mark.’

‘You sound like your mother.’

‘Take that back immediately.’