The Friend Request

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Something’s off this morning. I can feel it before I even open my eyes.

It’s nothing I can put my finger on. Just the weight of the duvet and the sound of Alex already moving around downstairs, the tap running and a cupboard door closing with that careful click he does when he’s trying not to wake me.

Which is funny, because the trying not to wake me is what wakes me. Every time.

I lie still, listening. The house sounds ordinary.

Kettle. Radio, low – he always turns it down when he’s the first one up, as if the newsreader might disturb the peace, but never thinks to put his shoes on before clomping across the kitchen tiles.

I can hear him down there now, moving from fridge to worktop to table, and I know exactly what he’s doing without needing to see it.

Bowl for Olivia’s cereal. His coffee in the blue mug, black, no sugar.

My tea left on the worktop going cold because he made it when he got up rather than when I came down, which means by the time I reach it the milk will have formed that skin I can’t stand.

He thinks making it early is thoughtful. I think it’s a way of ticking a box without having to be in the room when I drink it.

I push the duvet back and swing my legs out of the bed.

The floorboards are cold. The heating hasn’t kicked in yet, and outside the window the sky is grey, one of those mornings in autumn where the light barely commits to arriving.

I can see the rooftops of the houses opposite and the bins someone hasn’t wheeled back in from collection day.

A pigeon sits on the neighbour’s satellite dish, puffed and miserable.

Welcome to another Monday.

I pull on my dressing gown and check my phone.

Nothing urgent. A notification from the school app about a bake sale I’ll forget to contribute to, and a text from my mum asking if Olivia wants to come for lunch on Saturday.

I type I’ll ask her and leave it at that, because if I ring my mum now she’ll want twenty minutes and I haven’t even brushed my teeth.

The bathroom mirror is still fogged from Alex’s shower. I wipe a streak across it with my sleeve, and my face stares back at me, bloated, hair flat on one side. I’m half-asleep. I look like I went to bed at ten and still didn’t get enough rest.

I look like someone who’s been tired for thirteen years.

Downstairs, the kitchen is warm and bright, and Alex is standing at the island in his work shirt, scrolling through his phone with one hand and holding his coffee in the other. He glances up when I come in.

‘Morning,’ he says.

‘Morning.’

And that’s us. That’s the whole exchange. He goes back to his phone, and I go to the kettle and switch it on again because the tea he made me is, as predicted, cold and skin-topped and sitting in my favourite mug like a small act of passive aggression.

I pour it down the sink and start afresh. He doesn’t notice, or if he does, he doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know which is worse.

The thing is, we’re not at war. That’s what I’d say if anyone asked, and nobody does, because we don’t come across as a couple in trouble.

We seem fine. We’re like every other pair of parents on Olivia’s school run – a bit tired, a bit distracted, getting on with it.

And most of the time we are getting on with it.

We cook dinner, watch TV, talk about the mortgage and whether the car needs a service, and who’s picking Olivia up from netball on Thursday. We don’t shout. We don’t slam doors.

We just don’t quite touch any more.

I’m not even sure when it happened. There wasn’t a row, a betrayal, a single awful evening I can point to and say there, that’s when it changed. It just – thinned. Like paint that’s been spread too far. The colour’s still there if you squint, but the coverage isn’t what it used to be.

‘Olivia up?’ I ask, stirring my fresh tea.

‘Haven’t heard her.’ He checks his watch. ‘She needs to leave in forty minutes.’

‘I know when she needs to be out of the door, Alex.’

He holds up one hand, palm flat. ‘I’m just saying.’

‘And I’m just saying I know.’

He nods once, takes his coffee, and walks out of the kitchen towards the hallway. I hear him call up the stairs – ‘Liv? Time to get moving’ – and then the muffled groan of a teenager who considers seven-fifteen a crime against humanity.

I lean against the worktop, blow on my tea, and tell myself that was fine.

That was normal. Two parents managing a morning.

No raised voices, no nastiness, just the ordinary running of a household where everyone has somewhere to be and nobody wants to be the first one to say, Can we talk about the fact that we’ve been room-mates since Easter?

I sip my tea. It’s too hot.

Everything’s fine.

Olivia appears ten minutes later in half her uniform, her tie hanging loose and her hair in a ponytail that suggests she stood in front of the mirror for thirty seconds and gave up. She drops into a chair, pulls the cereal bowl towards her, and starts scrolling through her phone.

‘Good morning to you, too,’ I say.

She grunts. I sit opposite her and watch her eat, which she hates, so I look at my phone instead and pretend I’m reading something important.

She’s at that stage where my presence in the room is either invisible or mortifying, depending on whether her friends are nearby, and I try not to take it personally. I try.

‘Have you got everything for today?’ I ask.

‘Yep.’

‘PE kit?’

‘In my bag.’

‘The bag that’s been in the hallway since Friday?’

She pauses, spoon halfway to her mouth. ‘I’ll wash it tonight.’

‘You’ll wash it? When have you ever washed anything?’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

I catch the corner of a smile before she buries it in her cereal, and my chest goes warm for a second, that fierce pulse of love that hits at the strangest moments – over breakfast, over nothing.

She’s got Alex’s way of watching a room from the edges, but her expressions are mine.

Every flicker of amusement or suspicion crosses her face like a weather report I can read without thinking.

She’s the best thing I’ve ever done. And the fact that I think that every single morning and still manage to feel like I’m failing her by teatime tells you everything about the state of my head lately.

Alex comes back in, jacket on, keys in hand. He picks up his briefcase from the chair by the door and glances at Olivia.

‘Ready in ten?’

‘I’m eating.’

‘Eat faster.’ He says it lightly, but there’s a tightness around his jaw that means he’s already thinking about the drive, the traffic, the meeting he’s mentioned twice over the weekend. He looks at me. ‘I’ll drop her. I’ve got to go past the school anyway.’

‘Fine.’

‘Do you need anything from town?’

‘No. Thanks.’

He hesitates, just for a beat, as if there’s something else. Then he nods and walks to the front door. There’s the rustle of his jacket, the clunk of the latch, and then Olivia is shovelling the last of her cereal, grabbing her bag from the hallway, and calling, ‘Bye, Mum!’ without looking back.

The door closes. The house goes quiet.

I sit at the table with my hands round my mug and listen to the car start on the drive, reverse out, and pull away. I hear it get halfway down the road and then it’s gone, swallowed by the morning, and I’m alone.

This is the part of the day I’m supposed to enjoy.

The freelancer’s golden window – no school run, no interruptions, just me and my desk and whatever cover design I’m meant to be working on.

I’ve got a children’s fantasy brief that’s due Thursday and a set of amendments on a romance cover where the author wants the man’s jaw to be ‘stronger but not aggressive,’ which is one of those notes that sounds clear until you sit down and try to make it mean something in Photoshop.

I carry my tea through to the back room I use as an office.

It’s small, cluttered, and smells of the scented candle I burn when I’m on a deadline, which is often enough that the smell has soaked into the curtains.

My desk faces the window, which overlooks the garden, the fence, and the back of next door’s garage.

Not inspiring. But it’s mine, and when I’m working well – when the design is clicking and the client isn’t breathing down my neck – I can lose myself in it for hours and forget about everything else.

The marriage. The creeping dullness. The nagging feeling that I’ve spent the last fourteen years building a life I’m not entirely sure I chose on purpose.

I open my laptop and wait for it to load.

I should go straight to the design files.

I know I should. But the files need me to care about a fantasy landscape and a jaw that is strong but not aggressive, and right now my brain isn’t there yet.

It needs a soft run-up first. The scrolling. The easing in.

I open Facebook on my phone.

I don’t know why I still use it. Nobody my age admits to using it any more – everyone’s on Instagram or TikTok or whatever Olivia’s generation has migrated to this week – but I’ve had my account since university, and it’s like an old coat I can’t throw away.

I scroll past a school mum selling baby clothes, a recipe video for something involving feta and pasta that I’ll save and never make, and a post from a woman I went to college with who has just run a half marathon and wants everyone to know about it.

My thumb stops.

There’s a notification on the screen. A small red circle, tucked in the corner.

You have a new friend request.

I tap on it without reading the rest. It’s probably someone from the school, or one of those blank-profile strangers who add everyone and turn out to be selling something.

The name loads.

My stomach drops.

I stare at the screen. The kitchen tap is dripping somewhere behind me, a faint rhythmic plink I hadn’t noticed until now. The house feels too big and too quiet, and my tea has gone cold again in my hand.

Ross Mercer.

I read it again. Ross Mercer. The profile picture is small, a man in a dark coat, face half turned away from the camera, but I know. I know the way I’d know my own handwriting.

My hands are shaking.

I haven’t read that name in years. Haven’t said it out loud in longer than that.

And here it is, sitting on my phone screen at half eight on a Monday morning in my cluttered little office with the candle-scented curtains and the view of next door’s garage, as if it’s nothing.

As if he’s just someone from the past who fancies reconnecting.

But Ross Mercer doesn’t reconnect. Ross Mercer disappeared.

One day he was there – in the corridor, in the library, pressed close in the dark with his mouth on mine – and the next he was gone.

No note. No explanation. No goodbye. Just an empty desk, a phone that stopped ringing, and a seventeen-year-old girl who spent the next six months waiting for someone who was never coming back.

I put my phone down, screen up, and grip the table until my fingers go white.

He’s found me.

After all this time, Ross Mercer has found me.

I pick up the phone again. I should close the app.

I should put it away, open the design files, get on with my day, and treat this like what it probably is – a random click, a bored afternoon, a man clearing out old names and adding anyone he half remembers.

People do that. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

But my thumb is hovering over his name, my pulse is loud in my ears, the kitchen tap keeps dripping, and the house is so quiet I can hear my own breathing.

I tell myself it’s nothing.

I don’t believe a word of it.