Page 56 of The Friend Request

Alex gets up. He walks to the window, pulls the curtain back an inch, and stares out at the dark street. His reflection floats in the glass like a ghost, and I watch it because watching the real version of him is too much. The reflected Alex is easier. Smaller. Less furious.

‘We need to call the police,’ I say.

He drops the curtain. He turns around, and his face is doing something complicated that I can’t quite read – anger, yes, and hurt, a lot of hurt, but something else underneath both of those. Something that looks, horribly, like calculation.

‘Not tonight,’ he says.

‘Alex—’

‘I said, not tonight.’

He comes back to the sofa but doesn’t sit. He stands over me, and for a second I think he’s going to say something terrible – something final, something that ends this conversation and everything attached to it – but instead he puts his hand on the back of the sofa, grips it, and looks at me. When he speaks, his response comes out quieter than I was expecting.

‘If I see him right now,’ he says, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do. Do you understand that? I’m not being dramatic. I’m telling you that if Ross Mercer walks down our street tonight, I will go out there and I don’t know what happens next. And I’m not having the police in this house while I’m feeling like this because I don’t trust myself to sit in a room and give a calm, rational statement. Not tonight. Not yet.’

My heart is pounding. I’ve seen Alex angry before – cold angry, quiet angry, angry in a way that makes other men back down because there’s something behind it that doesn’t bluff – but I’ve never heard him say he doesn’t trust himself. Alex always trusts himself. It’s the thing he’s built his whole life on. Control, order, the right process in the right sequence. And I’ve broken it. I’ve taken that steady, decent, careful man and I’ve handed him something so ugly and so tangled that his own systems can’t hold it. I’ve pushed him to the point of standing in our living room telling me he doesn’t know what he’d do, and I believe him.

‘What do you want to do?’ I say.

He’s quiet for a long time. Long enough that I can hear Olivia’s music stop upstairs, which means she’s going to sleep, and the thought of her up there – warm and safe and knowing nothing about any of this – makes my throat ache so badly I have to press my lips together and breathe through my nose.

‘I think you should go somewhere,’ Alex says. ‘Somewhere he doesn’t know about. Somewhere away from here, just for a bit, while I work out what to do.’

‘You want me to leave?’

‘I want you to be safe.’

The words are kind, but his face is hard, and I can’t tell which one is real – the husband who still wants to protect me or the man who can’t stand to look at me right now. Maybe both. Maybe that’s what I’ve done to him. I’ve given him two things to feel at once, and neither of them cancels the other out. He’s stuck holding both of them with his white knuckles on the back of the sofa, his jaw clenched, and his eyes not quite meeting mine.

‘What about Olivia?’ I say.

‘Olivia goes to Mum and Dad’s in Leicester. I’ll drive her up first thing. She’ll be safe there while I work out what to do.’

‘And what do I tell her?’

‘Tell her you’re visiting someone. Tell her you need a few days for work. I don’t know, Kim. We’ll think of something. But right now I need you somewhere safe and I need—’ He stops. Swallows. ‘I need some space to think about this without you sitting in front of me, because every time I look at you, I think about him standing in our kitchen, and I can’t⁠—’

He doesn’t finish. He pushes off the sofa and walks into the kitchen. I hear the tap running and a glass filling and the tap shutting off, and then nothing. He’s standing in there on his own, in the exact spot where Ross held my wrist three days ago. He knows it, I know he knows it, and neither of us is going to say that out loud.

I sit on the sofa in the lamplight and listen to my husband breathing in the next room and my daughter sleeping above me. I tuck my cardigan tighter around myself, and I think about where I can go. Who I can call. Which direction to drive.

The house has never felt less like mine.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Alex doesn’t tell me where we’re going.

He stands in the bedroom doorway while I pack, arms folded, watching me open drawers, pull out jumpers and jeans and fold them into the holdall on the bed. He doesn’t help. He doesn’t comment on what I’m choosing, or how long I should pack for or whether I’ll need walking boots or a decent coat. He just stands there, leaning against the frame with his car keys in his hand, turning them over between his fingers with a slow, repetitive click that sets my teeth on edge.

‘How many days?’ I say.

‘A few.’

‘Alex, I need to know how much to⁠—’

‘Pack for a week. Better to have too much.’

A week. A week away from my daughter, my house, my work, my life. A week of not knowing what Alex is doing or thinking or deciding while I sit somewhere I’ve never been and wait for him to tell me whether my marriage still exists.