Page 53 of The Friend Request

You think your husband is going to protect you

He doesn’t even know does he

Bet he’d love to hear about the library

Bet he’d love to know what his wife really thinks about when the lights go off

I press my hand over my mouth. The taste of bile is bright and sharp at the back of my tongue. I swallow it down, hard. My eyes are burning, but I can’t look away from the screen because the bubbles are still arriving, and every time I think they’ve stopped, another one drops into place.

I’ve been patient Kim

I’ve been so fucking patient with you

And you treat me like I’m nothing

Like what we had was nothing

You don’t get to do that

The language shifts. I can feel it tipping, the way you feel a car start to slide on ice before the wheels have actually lost the road – the tone moving from accusation into threat, from hurt into something that wants to punish. The next messages come faster, barely a pause between them, as if whoever is typing has stopped filtering and started hammering.

I could tell him everything

I could send him photos

I could show up at your door and tell your daughter what her mum is really like

How would that feel Kim

How would it feel if Olivia knew

My daughter’s name on that screen.

In that context. Underneath that photo. Underneath those words. My daughter’s name sitting in a grey bubble as though it’s just another piece of ammunition, another thing to throw. Something cracks behind my ribs, and I make a sound I wasn’t expecting – a short, hard noise halfway between a gasp and a sob – and I clamp my teeth together and grip the steering wheel until the sound stops coming.

Olivia. Thirteen years old. Sitting in her school right now, in a maths lesson or a science lab, doodling in the margins of her exercise book, checking her phone under the desk when the teacher isn’t looking. My girl, who hugged me around the waist three days ago and said, ‘Happy birthday, Mum’ into my jumper, whose name is now sitting on my phone underneath a man’s naked body and a threat to ruin her life.

I put the phone face down on the passenger seat. I grip the steering wheel with both hands. My knuckles go white, my arms are shaking badly, and I stare through the blurred windscreen at the trees and the path and the grey sky pressing down on all of it. I try to breathe – in through the nose, out through the mouth.

The phone buzzes once more against the seat fabric. A single vibration.

I don’t want to look. Every part of me is screaming not to look, to start the engine and drive home and throw the phone in the river as I cross the bridge. But I reach for it because I have to know. I have to see where the bottom is.

Two final messages. Sent together, sitting at the foot of the screen below the rest, as if whoever wrote them paused before typing. Chose the words.

Silence isn’t protecting anyone any more

Especially not you

I lock the phone, put it in the glovebox, and press my palms flat against my thighs. Then I sit very still while the rain hammers down, and the van reverses out past me with its engine rattling.

Is it Ross? What if it’s not? But it has to be. Of course it has to be.

The curtains – he stood in my house three days ago, he could have looked up at the landing window on his way out and clocked the colour. Olivia’s name – he sat next to her on the sofa and asked her about school, and she answered him, chatty and bright, the way she is with adults she hasn’t decided to be shy around yet.

But the photo. The messages. The venom. I think about Ross in my kitchen with rain on his shoulders and his voice going soft as he said one moment, that’s all I wanted, and I try to fit that man inside the person who sent those words, and I can’t make the shape match. Ross was gentle. Ross was wounded, and quiet, and bruised, and the look on his face when he said my name was not the look of someone who’d type you don’t get to do that and follow it with a threat to tell my daughter⁠—

But then I think about his hand on my wrist. The way he didn’t let go when I asked. The way his grip was soft, not rough, as if tenderness and control were the same thing to him.