Page 6 of The Friend Request

Chapter Three

It starts with something small.

The first message arrives on a Tuesday evening while I’m washing up. Alex is in the living room with his laptop open, Olivia is upstairs doing homework or pretending to, and I’m standing at the sink with my hands in warm water and my phone on the worktop beside me. It buzzes once, and I glance down, expecting a client email or a reminder about Olivia’s school trip payment. Instead, I see his name.

Ross Mercer.

Hi Kim. Wasn’t sure you’d accept. Really glad you did.

I dry my hands on the tea towel and pick up the phone. My back is to the doorway. The television is on in the other room, some panel show Alex watches where people shout over each other, and the low murmur of his laugh at something I haven’t heard filters through. I read the message twice, then type back.

Hi. Honestly wasn’t sure I would either.

I put the phone down, finish the washing-up, and tell myself that’s it. One polite exchange. Two people who used to know each other, saying hello after many years. Nothing to feel strange about. Nothing to hide.

He replies within a minute.

Fair enough. How are you? Stupid question probably, after this long, but I don’t know where else to start.

I smile. I can’t help it. There’s something disarming about the awkwardness of it – the admission that he doesn’t know the rules either, that this is odd territory for both of us. I type back while the water drains and the kitchen goes quiet.

I’m good. Married. Daughter. Freelance designer. All very grown-up and boring. You?

I shouldn’t have added the ‘you’. I know that even as I send it, because ‘you’ is an open door, and open doors are hard to close once someone walks through them.

But I leave it.

Over the next two days, the messages keep coming, and each one arrives a little faster than the last. We swap the basics first – jobs, places, the broad strokes of the years between then and now. Ross is vague about some of it, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s living outside Bristol, he says. Working in project management for a construction firm, something practical and unglamorous that he talks about with a shrug I can almost see through the screen. No wife. No kids. A flat he describes as ‘adequate, if you’re being generous’ that makes me laugh out loud at the kitchen table while Olivia looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

‘What’s funny?’ she asks.

‘Nothing. Just a friend.’

She rolls her eyes and goes back to her cereal. A flicker of guilt that I can’t explain shivers through me. I haven’t lied. Ross is a friend – an old one, a distant one, someone from a part of my life that has nothing to do with this kitchen or this family. But the word ‘friend’ sounds wrong. It doesn’t cover the weight of what we were, and using it is like putting a plaster over something that needs stitches.

By Wednesday evening, the conversation has shifted. The facts run out, and what’s left underneath is memory – and memory is where it gets dangerous.

Ross mentions the old school. The library with the dodgy radiator that clanked like a broken clock every afternoon. The window round the back of the science block that never latched properly, the one we used to climb through on winter evenings when the building was dark and locked and ours. I read his messages sitting cross-legged on the bed with Alex in the shower, and feel an excitement that’s been missing from my life for so long.

Do you remember Mrs Alcott catching us in the corridor that time? he writes. Your face. I thought you were going to die on the spot.

I nearly did. She looked at me like I’d committed an actual crime.

To be fair, we had broken in.

Technically, we’d broken in through a window. That’s trespass, not burglary. I looked it up.

Of course you did.

I’m smiling again. That warm, soft, stupid feeling, like slipping into a bath – a feeling I haven’t had in so long I’d forgotten what it does to the muscles in my face. I glimpse myself in the bedroom mirror, and I look different. Lighter. Younger. Like I haven’t spent the last five years worrying about money and school fees and whether my husband notices when I’m upset.

I look like the girl I used to be.

Alex comes out of the bathroom, towelling his hair. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine.’ I lock the screen and put the phone on the bedside table. ‘Just checking emails.’

‘At this hour?’