Page 77 of The Friend Request

‘Yes.’

He puts the note down. Lays it flat, smooths the crease he made. His hands go to his face. Palms pressed to his eyes, fingers splayed across his forehead. His shoulders are rigid. His chest rises and falls once, twice, and on the third breath something gives.

He cries.

It comes out in a single, ragged sound – not a sob exactly, something rougher. A noise I have never heard him make in fourteen years together, not when his father died, not when Olivia was born early and they took her away for tests. Alex doesn’t cry. Alex stays level and processes and plans. Alex is the man who tells me to drive carefully when the world is falling apart, who irons his work shirts the night before and hangs them on the wardrobe door in order. And he is sitting at our kitchen table with his hands over his face, crying for our daughter.

I touch his arm. He flinches – just barely, a tiny involuntary jerk – and then he lets me continue. I close my fingers round his wrist and I hold on. His pulse is racing under my thumb.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Alex, I’m so sorry.’

He pulls his hands away. His eyes are red, his face wet, and when he looks at me it’s all there – the fury, the fear, the love, the hurt – all of it layered up with no space between. I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.

‘You should have told me,’ he says. ‘Weeks ago. The first time he contacted you, the first message, the first time you saw his face – you should have come to me and said, this man is back, and I need help. That’s what I’m for, Kim.’

‘I know.’

‘Instead, you hid it. You met him. You kept the whole thing from me for weeks, and now our daughter is gone, and I’m sitting here watching my wife lie to the police about why. And I can’t even blame them for believing you, because the story you told was better than the truth, wasn’t it? Kissed a bloke in a bar. Made it sound worse than it was to get my sympathy. That’s clever. That’s a good lie.’

The bitterness in his voice is chilling. I deserve it. I deserve every word of it. I opened the door to Ross one secret at a time, one meeting, one message, one silence, and the gap I left between us was wide enough for someone to walk through and take our child.

‘I was frightened,’ I say. It sounds pathetic. But it’s the truth. ‘I was frightened of what you’d think. Then I was frightened of Ross. And then the note – and by the time the police were sitting here, I was so scared of saying the wrong thing that I said nothing. I chose the note over you. I chose it because the note was about Olivia, and she’s⁠—’

‘She’s everything,’ he says. ‘I know. She’s everything to me, too.’

The kitchen clock ticks. The fridge hums. Somewhere outside a car passes on the road. Its headlights sweep briefly across the ceiling and disappear.

‘So what do we do?’ I say.

Alex picks up the note again. He holds it in both hands, elbows on the table. I watch his eyes track across the words, and I can almost see the shift happening – the solicitor’s brain clicking in behind the father’s panic, sorting the pieces, laying them out. He’s angry, and he’s terrified, but he’s also thinking, and Alex thinking is the most useful thing in any room.

‘He wants you at the school,’ Alex says. ‘Tomorrow night.’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone.’

‘That’s what it says.’

He turns the note over, as if there might be something on the back. There isn’t. He turns it back.

‘Tell me about the school,’ he says. ‘Not the memories. The building. Layout. Doors, windows, how you’d get in.’

‘Alex—’

‘If you’re going in there, I need to know what’s waiting.’

If you’re going. If. The word sits between us, and my stomach drops because he’s already past the argument. He’s accepted it the way you accept bad news from a doctor – not because you want to, but because the alternative is doing nothing, and doing nothing while your daughter is missing isn’t something Alex Stiller is capable of.

‘It’s a secondary school,’ I say. ‘Standard layout – main block, gym, science wing. Two storeys. There’s a library on the first floor where Ross and I used to meet. And there’s a window on the ground floor round the back, near the kitchens, that doesn’t latch properly. Or it didn’t, twenty-odd years ago. We used to climb through it after hours.’

‘Twenty years is a long time.’

‘I know.’

‘They could have replaced every window in the building.’

‘They could have.’