Page 52 of The Friend Request

I turn back along the path, and I’m almost at the car when my phone buzzes in my coat pocket.

I stop. Take it out. The screen is wet from the drizzle, and I wipe it on my sleeve before I look.

It’s a text. Unknown number. No name. Just a mobile I don’t recognise, and a message underneath it.

My hand goes to my mouth. The phone feels suddenly very heavy, as if the weight of the words has made it denser. I tighten my fingers around it until the case bites into my palm. The path is empty. The river is loud. There’s nobody here to see my face, and I’m grateful for that because I can feel the colour draining out of it, can feel the blood pulling back from my cheeks and my lips and rushing somewhere deep and panicked inside my chest.

I look up at the car park, at the three other cars sitting in their spaces, at the hedgerow, at the road beyond. Everything is still. A bird lifts from the railing and wheels away over the water.

My phone buzzes again. Same number.

I don’t read the message. Not yet. I’m not ready.

I get into the car and lock the doors and sit with the phone face down on my thigh and both hands on the steering wheel and my breath coming fast and shallow, and I stare through the windscreen at the flat grey sky and the dripping trees and the empty path, and I think: So this is it. This is how it starts.

I was wrong about telling Alex tonight.

I was wrong about having time.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I shouldn’t open it.

That’s the first thing I think, sitting in the car with the doors locked, the engine off, and rain speckling the windscreen in fat, slow drops that join and slide sideways when the wind catches them. I shouldn’t open it, because nothing good has ever arrived from an unknown number at a moment like this, and I already know – somewhere deep and sick in the pit of my stomach, somewhere I can’t reason with – that whatever’s waiting on that screen is going to change things in a way I can’t take back.

But I pick the phone up anyway. I turn it over. I look.

The image loads before I can stop it.

It fills the screen – skin and angles and the close, purposeful framing that makes it clear this wasn’t accidental, wasn’t a wrong number, wasn’t meant for somebody else’s wife in somebody else’s car park on a grey Wednesday morning. It’s a body. A man’s body. Naked from the chest down, shot in a bathroom mirror with the flash bouncing hard off the tiles. The face is cropped out at the jawline, but that almost makes it worse because the absence feels intentional. Strategic. This isn’t a picture someone sent in the heat of a moment. This is something aimed.

My stomach lurches, and I drop the phone on to my lap as if the screen has scalded me.

For a few seconds I just sit there, breathing hard, staring at the headrest of the passenger seat because I physically cannot look down. Rain taps against the roof. The car park is empty except for a silver hatchback two spaces over and a delivery van near the entrance with its hazards blinking. I’m grateful for the privacy because my face is doing things I can’t control – mouth open, fixed on the headrest, a grimace that keeps twitching between disgust and something closer to raw fear.

I want to throw the phone out of the window. I want to drop it in the footwell and stamp on it until the screen cracks.

Then it buzzes again.

And again.

And again.

I force myself to look. The messages are stacking up underneath the photo, one after another, grey bubbles climbing the screen in a column.

I know where you live Kim

I know which bedroom is yours

The one on the left with the blue curtains

I’ve watched your lights go off

My throat closes. I read the words and read them again, and my brain keeps trying to rearrange them into something manageable – a wrong number, a prank, kids messing about with a pay-as-you-go SIM, some sad bloke who got the wrong end of the stick. But the blue curtains are right. Our bedroom curtains are blue. I chose them from John Lewis two years ago because I liked the weight of the fabric, and Alex said they were too dark, and I said they’d fade in the sun, and they have, slightly, along the edges where the light catches them every afternoon. And this person knows that. Ross knows that. He’s stood outside my house on my street in Keynsham, looked up at my window, and watched my lights go out. The idea of it – a figure on the pavement, face tipped upwards, counting seconds until the glow behind the blue curtains disappears – makes me want to be sick.

The messages keep coming.

You think you can keep ignoring me