Page 42 of The Friend Request

And I know, before she says a single word, that whatever she tells me is going to knock every one of them down.

Chapter Eighteen

Lisa won’t look at me.

She’s staring at her coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug, and there’s a flush creeping up her neck that I remember from school – the same blotchy pink she used to get before oral presentations, before parents’ evenings, before anything that required her to say something she couldn’t take back. I watch it spread and I think: This is going to be about Ross. And then I think: Of course it is. What else would it be?

The café noise fills the silence between us. Someone’s toddler is banging a spoon on a high-chair tray. The coffee machine shrieks and hisses. A woman two tables over laughs at something on her phone, a big, open laugh that feels obscene in the middle of whatever is happening here.

‘So,’ I say, because somebody has to.

Lisa takes a breath. ‘Right. Okay.’ She lifts her eyes to mine and then drops them again.

I can see her running through whatever she’s prepared, checking the order, making sure it comes out the way she practised it in the car or the shower or wherever people rehearse the conversations they’ve been putting off for years.

‘This is about Ross,’ she says.

I nod. My pulse is doing something unpleasant in my throat, but I keep my face still, my hands flat on the table, and I wait.

‘When we were at school,’ she says. ‘When you and Ross were together. There were a couple of times when—’ She stops. Swallows. Tries again. ‘There were a couple of moments. Between me and him. Behind your back.’

The words fill my chest, and for a second I can’t breathe properly. I’m sixteen again, Ross is everything, Lisa is my friend, and the world is small and intense and absolutely certain.

Then the second passes, and I’m thirty-seven, sitting in a café on the high street with a flat white going cold in front of me. My daughter is in the car outside, my husband is at work, and the girl I was at sixteen has nothing to do with the woman I am now.

Or she shouldn’t anyway.

‘What kind of moments?’ I ask, and thankfully it comes out calm, not angry or tearful.

Lisa winces. ‘Nothing – I mean, we didn’t sleep together. It wasn’t like that. But there was a party, at Gavin Holt’s house, do you remember? You’d gone home early because you felt ill, and Ross stayed, and we ended up talking in the garden and he kissed me. I kissed him back.’ She says this last part quickly, like ripping off a plaster. ‘And then there was another time, after school, behind the sports hall. He found me on my own, and it just – happened. Twice. That’s it. Twice, and then I told him it couldn’t happen again, and he said fine, and that was the end of it.’

‘You knew?’ I say. ‘About me and Ross? We never told anyone.’

Lisa gives me a look that’s almost pitying. ‘Melanie worked it out. Ages before – the way he watched you, the way you both left rooms two minutes apart. She told me, and we never said anything because you so obviously didn’t want us to.’ She turns her mug in a slow circle. ‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? I knew he was yours. And I still did it.’

I sit there and take it in. I watch Lisa’s face crumple with the guilt she’s been carrying around like a bag of bricks, and I wait to feel what I’m supposed to feel, which is betrayed, furious, devastated. The holy trinity of finding out your first love cheated on you with your friend.

But it doesn’t come. Not the way it would have five or ten years ago, or even six months ago. It hurts, yes – there’s a dull ache inside me that I recognise as something old and bruised being pressed on – but it’s not the sharp, blinding pain I would have expected. It’s more like pressing on a scar you forgot you had. Tender but healed. Mostly.

‘Kim, say something,’ Lisa says. ‘Please. I’ve been wanting to tell you for years, and I just never knew how. I know it was wrong, and I’m sorry. We were kids. I’m not making excuses, but we were kids, and he was⁠—’

‘Persuasive,’ I say.

She blinks. ‘Yeah. He was.’

‘I know.’

Lisa stares at me. She’s braced for tears, or shouting, or the cold fury that women save for betrayals that are decades old and perfectly preserved. I can see it in the way she’s gripping her mug, white-knuckled, ready for the blast.

‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I ask, although I think I already know the answer.

Lisa stirs her spoon around her cup, her gaze on the table. ‘Someone from back in the day got in touch, and I guess it brought up memories I’d forgotten, or buried, maybe.’

I don’t need to ask who contacted her.

‘I forgive you,’ I say.

The words surprise me as much as they surprise her. But they’re true. I can feel it – the forgiveness isn’t something I’m performing or choosing to give because I want to seem generous. It’s just there, like it’s been waiting for this moment to announce itself. Lisa and Ross behind the sports hall, Lisa and Ross in Gavin Holt’s garden – they feel like scenes from someone else’s life. A play I once watched and cried over but can’t summon the same emotion for now.