Page 44 of The Friend Request

Lisa nods. She looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t push it. She finishes her coffee, and we make brief small talk about her job, her kids, a holiday she’s booked for August, and the state of the high street. It’s thin, polite, and full of holes, but it gets us from the table to the door without either of us having to say anything else that matters.

She hugs me outside on the pavement.

‘Look after yourself, Kim,’ she says.

‘I will.’

She walks away towards the car park. I watch her go, then I turn and go the other way, towards my car where Olivia is sitting in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard and her phone held up to her face.

I get in, put my seat belt on, and start the engine.

‘Who was that?’ Olivia asks, not looking up.

‘Just an old friend from school.’

‘What did she want?’

‘Nothing much. Just a catch-up.’

Olivia nods, satisfied, and goes back to her phone. I pull out of the parking space and drive us home with both hands on the wheel and a smile on my face, and the sick, cold knowledge that the version of Ross I loved never existed at all.

Which means I don’t know the man who’s been texting me.

And that’s so much worse.

Chapter Nineteen

It’s been over a week without a text, a missed call, a notification from an unknown number. Eight days of checking my phone and finding nothing but Alex, Olivia’s school, a client chasing feedback on a cover proof, and a group chat from Olivia’s year about a non-uniform day that seems to have descended into full civil war over whether scrunchies count as accessories.

Normal things. Ordinary things. Things that make up a life when nobody is trying to dismantle it from the outside.

By the ninth day, I start to breathe a bit easier. By the tenth, I let myself think the thing I’ve been too frightened to think, which is that maybe it’s over. Maybe the text was just an ugly outburst – Ross losing his temper, lashing out, saying something vile because he could – and now he’s thought better of it and crawled back into whatever hole he came from. People do that. They flare up and then they burn out. Even Ross. Even someone who kissed my friend behind the sports hall, vanished from my life without a word, and came back years later like he’d only popped to the shops.

Maybe he’s done.

I don’t believe it completely. There’s a small, stubborn part of me that won’t let go of the dread, that keeps one eye on the door and one ear on my phone and flinches every time I see a figure across the street who’s roughly the right height and build. But the rest of me – the tired, hopeful, desperate rest of me – leans into the quiet like a warm bath and lets it hold me up.

I pick Olivia up from school, and she tells me about a supply teacher who accidentally projected his Spotify on to the whiteboard, and the whole class saw his Taylor Swift playlist. Her story makes me laugh so hard I have to pull over. I text Alex a photo of the pasta bake I’ve made for dinner, and he sends back three fire emojis and a heart, which for a man who treats his phone like a fax machine is the equivalent of a love letter. When a publisher says the cover design I’ve just finished is the best thing I’ve sent in months, I sit at my desk and feel something warm that I think might be pride, or relief, or just the absence of fear, which at this point feels close enough to happiness that I’ll take it.

Friday comes, and I have errands in town. Olivia is at school, Alex is at work, and I spend the afternoon doing the mundane things that used to bore me rigid and now feel like proof that my life still belongs to me – dry cleaning, the post office, a new light bulb for the landing because the old one’s been flickering for a fortnight and I keep forgetting. I buy a bunch of flowers from the bucket outside the Co-op because they’re yellow and cheerful and I feel like a woman who buys flowers for no reason. When I drive home, it’s with the windows cracked, the radio on, and the flowers on the passenger seat looking absurdly optimistic.

Then I pull on to our street, and something snags.

The house looks wrong – the curtains are closed, which is odd because I left them open, but that’s just curtains. But there’s a shadow. It could be a draught, a gust, or a trick of the light. It could be nothing.

Behind the glass in the front door, something moves. A shape, there and gone, the way a person looks when they pass through a hallway quickly and don’t expect anyone to be watching from outside.

My hands go cold on the steering wheel.

I sit in the car with the engine running, stare at the house, and tell myself I’m being ridiculous. It’s a shadow. It’s the light from the kitchen catching the glass. It’s nothing.

But the curtains are closed. Alex isn’t due home for hours, and Olivia is at school.

I pick up my phone and call Alex. It rings four times and goes to voicemail, and my heart drops into my stomach because Alex always picks up when I call. Always. Even in meetings, even when he’s with a client, he’ll text back within a minute to say he can’t talk. I call again. Voicemail again. I type a message – Are you home? I think there’s someone in the house. – and send it and watch the screen and wait.

Nothing.

So why is someone inside my home?