Page 7 of The Friend Request

‘My Edinburgh client never sleeps.’

He doesn’t question it. Why would he? I’ve never given him a reason to, and the ease with which the lie slips out makes something cold slide through my stomach. I’ve just lied to my husband about a man I used to love, and it came out as smoothly as asking him to pass the milk.

That should worry me more than it does.

On Thursday, Ross sends a message that stops me mid-sentence in the middle of a design brief I’m working on. I’m at my desk, coffee at my elbow, laptop open, and the notification drops from the top of the screen like a quiet little grenade.

Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer.

I stare at it. My fingers hover over the keyboard, caught between the brief and the phone, between the woman I’m supposed to be and the one who’s been holding her breath for three days.

Go on.

I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. More than I probably should have. And I know this is going to sound mad, but being back here, talking to you again – it’s the first time in a long time anything’s felt right. Does that make sense?

My throat tightens. I read it three times, then once more. Each time the words hit me in a place I thought I’d bricked up, wallpapered over, and learned to live without. Because it does make sense. That’s the problem. It makes more sense than anything has in months.

I type back:

It makes sense.

And then, because I can’t stop myself:

I’ve thought about you, too.

The moment I send it, I want to claw it back. I sit at my desk with my hands gripping the edge and my heart going like a train, and I think about what I’ve just admitted – not just to Ross, but to myself. That he’s been there all this time, somewhere underneath the marriage and the mortgage and the routines, like a name scratched into a desk that you keep covering with papers but never quite hide away.

He doesn’t reply straight away. Ten minutes. Twenty. I pretend to work. I adjust the colour balance on a cover file, move a title two millimetres to the left, undo it, redo it, save without changing anything. When the notification finally comes, I almost knock my coffee over reaching for the phone.

Then let me take you to dinner. Somewhere in Bristol, neutral ground, no pressure. Just two people who have years to catch up on.

I put the phone down.

The word ‘dinner’ makes it hard to swallow. Dinner is not messaging. Dinner is not a harmless exchange of old school stories on a Tuesday night. Dinner is a table and two chairs and his face across from mine, intimate and real. Dinner is a thing you’d have to explain if someone asked where you were going, and I already know – without needing to think about it for even a second – that I wouldn’t tell Alex the truth.

Which tells me everything, really.

I stand and walk to the kitchen. I fill the kettle, switch it on, open the fridge, close it again. I lean against the worktop, press my palms flat on the cold worktop, and try to think clearly. But my thoughts are tangled and hot, and I can’t get hold of the right thread.

I shouldn’t go. I know that. I’m married, I’ve got a daughter, I’ve got a life that works – not perfectly, not the way I imagined it would when I was seventeen and sitting on a wall with a boy who smelled of cigarettes, but it works. Alex is decent. Alex is here. Alex didn’t vanish one day and leave a hole so deep I spent years throwing other people into it trying to fill it up.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Ross vanished, and I never found out why, and the not knowing has been eating away at me for years. I carried it through university, my twenties, into this marriage. I’ve told myself it doesn’t matter any more, that I’m over it, and maybe I even believed it until three days ago when his name appeared on my phone and my body remembered what it felt like to lose him.

I want to know why he left.

That’s all I want. Just the answer. Just the missing piece I’ve been walking around without since I was seventeen, so I can finally put it somewhere and stop tripping over the gap.

Is that so terrible?

The kettle clicks off. Steam curls up towards the ceiling and fades. The house is silent – Olivia at school, Alex at work, nobody here but me and a question I’ve been avoiding for two decades.

I go back to my desk and pick up the phone. Ross’s question is still waiting to be answered.

Somewhere in Bristol, neutral ground, no pressure.

I open the message, my thumbs find the keys, and I type one word.

When?