Page 88 of The Friend Request

‘I contacted Kim Stiller about six weeks ago. I’d seen her online – her work, her profile, photographs of her family. And I thought about the way things ended between us, when we were teenagers, and I felt ashamed. Because I left without saying goodbye. The thing is, I was scared. Kim scared me. The constant phone calls, following me everywhere, anonymous notes posted through my letter box. I loved her more than I’ve loved anyone, but it was driving me crazy, and I couldn’t go on like that. It was my mum who persuaded me to leave town, and I didn’t fight it. I didn’t contact Kim, and I knew – I always knew – that it would have hurt her. So I sent her a friend request. I wanted to put things right and apologise. That was all I wanted. An apology and a conversation, and then we’d both go home to our lives. Actually, no, that’s not all I wanted. Part of me was curious. Curious to see if she still had the same effect on me as when we were teenagers. Intensity, however dysfunctional, can be addictive. You know?’

He stops again. Glances down at the table. When he looks back up, there’s something in his face I recognise from the library – the expression I couldn’t read in the lamplight, the one I thought was menace.

It wasn’t menace. It was grief.

‘We met for dinner. It was good, at first. We talked about the past, about school, about the stupid things we did. And then it changed. She wanted more. Our goodbye turned into a kiss. I wanted it at first, then I didn’t. I knew it was wrong, knew I couldn’t go back there. So I said no.’ He swallows. ‘After that, everything went wrong.’

I pause the video. I put the phone face down on the bath mat and press my hands against my knees and breathe. The shower is still running. Steam is filling the room. My face in the mirror is a white smudge behind the condensation, featureless, unrecognisable.

I pick the phone up and press play.

Ross talks for another eighteen minutes. He talks about the messages that started arriving from anonymous accounts – sexual, threatening, explicit. He talks about the photograph that was sent to his work email with a note claiming he’d shared intimate images. He talks about my messages becoming stranger, more insistent, laced with references to things only I could know, and about the dawning realisation that the threats and the tenderness were coming from the same person.

He talks about why he went to the cottage.

‘I drove to Wales because I was desperate,’ he says. ‘I know how that sounds. But she’d spent weeks building a version of me that doesn’t exist – a stalker, an obsessive, a danger to her family – and I could see it working. Her husband believed it. Her friends will believe it. The police will believe it if she goes to them, and then my life is over. A woman’s word against a man’s, and I’ve got no proof except screenshots she can say I faked.’ He presses his palms flat on the table. ‘So I went to the cottage. I tried the doors. I know how that looks, and I’m not proud of it. I was desperate and frightened, and I wasn’t thinking straight. But when they wouldn’t open, I posted a note through the letter box asking her to talk to me – one conversation, face to face. Yes, I’ve brought her daughter into it, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. But I honestly could not see any other way. I posted the note, and I drove away. I didn’t throw anything. I didn’t break any windows.’

He leans forward. Closer to the camera. His eyes are bright, and his voice is raw.

‘I know what I’m about to do is wrong,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take her daughter to the school. Not to hurt her – I’d never hurt a child. But I need Kim to come to me in a place she can’t rewrite, and the school is the only place that means something to both of us.

‘Olivia and I got on well at Kim’s birthday party. We talked about school, about music, the stuff you talk to a thirteen-year-old about. After that, I bumped into her in town a couple of times – once outside the newsagent, once near the park – and we chatted. She’s a good kid. She’s bright and funny, and she trusts people, which is what makes this so unforgivable.

‘I’ve told her I’m planning a surprise for her mum. A reunion at the old school, candles in the library, the whole thing. I’ve told her it has to be secret, or it won’t work. Her phone will be off – I’ve told her that’s part of it, that her mum checks her location and it would ruin the surprise. She’ll be with me the whole time, warm and fed and looked after, however long it takes – as far as she’s concerned, the waiting’s all part of the game. And she believes me, because why wouldn’t she? She’s thirteen. She thinks adults tell the truth.’

He stops. Presses his hands against his face. When he lowers them, his eyes are wet.

‘I’m going to talk to Kim about what happened in the past, show her the evidence, face to face, and ask her to stop. That’s all. I know she’ll say I kidnapped her daughter. I know she’ll say I’m dangerous. But I’ve run out of ways to make anyone listen, and I don’t know what else to do.’

The video ends. The screen goes black. I stare at my reflection in the glass – my face, my eyes, the bathroom behind me – and I wait for the shaking to stop.

It doesn’t stop.

I think about what he said. I think about the note – the one I told Alex was wrapped around a brick, the one I unfolded on the kitchen table with block capitals and black marker and the words YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. The note the police have in an evidence bag. The note that made Alex drive to the school with me and hide in the dark and tackle Ross into the bookshelves.

And I think about the other note. The one Ross posted through the cottage letter box after he’d tried the doors and given up. The one I found on the mat, written in Ross’s handwriting, quiet and desperate. The one that asked me to meet him, that brought Olivia into things.

The one I burned in the fireplace before I wrote my own. He’d put my daughter’s name on paper. He’d brought her into it, and he couldn’t get away with it.

Something rises in my chest – not guilt, not exactly, something older and colder, something I’ve been carrying since I was seventeen and Ross Mercer left me without a word. I spent twenty years telling myself I was the one who’d been wronged. I was the wronged one. I was the victim. I was the girl who got left, and everything that came after – the messages, the accounts, the photograph, the note on the kitchen table, the brick I threw through my own window and blamed on a dead man – was justified. Because he hurt me first. Because he left. Because he chose someone else over me, and then he chose silence, and then he came back and chose decency over desire, and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear being the woman Ross Mercer didn’t want, not again, not twice in one lifetime.

So I made sure he’d never get the chance to say so.

The email from Catherine says the story will be in the press by lunchtime. She’s given them the video, the screenshots, the metadata. She’s given them everything Ross left behind, and by the end of the day every person I know – Alex, my friends, Olivia’s school, the neighbours – will see the version of events I’ve spent six weeks burying.

I turn the shower off. I unlock the bathroom door. Alex is sitting on the edge of the bed, awake, his phone in his hand. He looks up at me, and I know from his face that Catherine has emailed him, too.

‘Kim,’ he says. ‘What is this?’

I open my mouth. The lies are right there – I can feel them queuing up, ready and practised, the same lies I’ve been telling for weeks, for months, for twenty years. I could explain. I could reframe, soften, redirect. I could cry and shake and say it’s been taken out of context, that Ross was manipulating the evidence, that his sister is grieving and angry and this is her revenge.

But Alex is glaring at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before, as if he is looking at someone he doesn’t recognise.

‘Alex—’

‘Is any of it true?’ he says. ‘What he says in the video. The messages. The accounts. The note.’ He pauses. ‘The brick.’

I don’t answer. The silence stretches between us, and it fills the bedroom the way it filled the cottage, the way it filled the years between Ross leaving and Ross coming back. Silence is the thing I do. It’s the thing I’ve always done – when the truth is too ugly, when the story needs reshaping, when the version in my head is cleaner than the version that actually happened.