Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Three days pass, and Ross doesn’t stop.
The first message arrives on Tuesday morning, while I’m sitting at my desk pretending to work on a cover layout I’ve barely touched.
Kim, please. I just want to talk.
I read it, lock the phone, and put it face down on the desk. Five minutes later, another one.
I’m not trying to pressure you. I just think we should talk about what happened.
I read that one, too, and my stomach clenches, and I put the phone in my bag and zip it shut as if that will somehow keep his words from reaching me.
It doesn’t.
By Wednesday, he’s sent four more. They arrive at odd intervals – mid-morning, lunchtime, late afternoon, once at eleven at night when I’m lying in bed next to Alex with the covers pulled up, the room dark and my phone glowing under the duvet like a dirty secret.
I know you’re reading these. I can see the ticks.
He’s right. I am reading them. Every single one. I open them, absorb them, let the guilt churn through my chest, and then I close the app and carry on with my day as if nothing has happened.
But something has happened, and he won’t let me forget it.
His messages aren’t aggressive. That’s what makes them harder to dismiss. He doesn’t demand, doesn’t accuse, doesn’t threaten. He writes the way he talks – quiet, plain, careful – and every message sounds reasonable, which is the worst thing it could sound, because reasonable is difficult to hate.
I’m sorry about the other night. I shouldn’t have kissed you. But I don’t regret it, and I don’t think you do either.
I read that one three times, sitting in the car outside Tesco with a bag of shopping on the passenger seat, the engine running, and my hands shaking so badly I drop the phone into the footwell and have to fish it out from under the pedals.
He’s wrong. I do regret it.
I have to regret it.
On Thursday morning, I block him. I sit at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold beside me, open Facebook and find his profile and press the button.
The screen asks me if I’m sure, I press confirm, and just like that, Ross Mercer disappears from my phone as cleanly as he disappeared from my life years ago.
My chest feels hollow.
I close the app, drink my cold coffee, and tell myself this is the right thing.
The only thing. Whatever happened between us on that street in Bristol – the kiss, the warmth, the pull of old feelings dragging me somewhere I have no business going – it’s over.
I’ve ended it. I’ve drawn a line and stepped back behind it, and now I can get on with my actual life, which involves a husband, a daughter, a mortgage, and a stack of cover briefs I haven’t touched in a week.
The relief lasts about forty minutes.
After that, the guilt arrives, and it doesn’t leave.
I throw myself into the house. Into the marriage.
Into the small acts of family life that I’ve been sleepwalking through for months without noticing.
I cook dinner every night – proper dinners, not the pasta-and-jar-of-sauce meals I usually manage.
I ask Alex about work and actually listen to the answers instead of nodding while I think about something else.
I sit on Olivia’s bed and talk to her about school, about her friends, about the boy in her maths class she thinks is annoying but keeps mentioning, and I laugh at her impressions of her teachers and tell her she’s brilliant, because she is, and because saying it out loud feels like a prayer I’m sending up to whoever decides whether bad mothers get second chances.
Alex notices the change. He doesn’t say much about it – that’s not his style – but I catch him watching me across the kitchen with a look that isn’t quite suspicion and isn’t quite gratitude. It’s a look that says, Oh, there you are. As if I’ve been away and he’s glad I’m back.
It makes me want to be sick.
Because the reason I’m trying harder is not because I’ve rediscovered my love for my husband, or because I’ve had some great epiphany about the value of what we’ve built together.
It’s because I kissed another man on a dark street in Bristol and the guilt is eating me alive.
And every nice dinner I cook, every question I ask about his day, every time I reach across the sofa and put my hand on his arm is just another coat of paint over the crack.
The crack is still there, the paint is wet, and if he peers closely enough, he’ll see it.
On Friday evening, we order a takeaway and watch a film with Olivia curled between us on the sofa, her head on my shoulder, her feet in Alex’s lap, and the three of us wrapped in a blanket.
The curtains are drawn, the lamp’s on, and the remains of chicken tikka are congealing on the coffee table.
Olivia falls asleep before the end. Alex carries her upstairs and I follow, pulling the duvet over her, brushing her hair off her forehead, standing in the doorway of her room and watching her breathe.
‘She’s out cold,’ Alex says, coming up behind me.
‘Must be the fresh air. She had hockey after school.’
‘She’ll be playing for England at this rate.’
‘She’ll be playing for anyone who’ll have her. She’s obsessed.’
He puts his hand on my waist. A light touch, comfortable, habitual. ‘This has been a good week,’ he says.
I lean into him because it’s what I’m supposed to do. Part of me means it, but the other part of me is screaming so loudly, I’m amazed he can’t hear it. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It has.’
We go to bed. Alex falls asleep within minutes, like he always does. I lie there in the dark, listening to him breathe, and think about Ross, and the messages, and the blocked profile, and the kiss, and I tell myself again that it’s over.
It’s done. I’ve closed the door.
On Saturday morning, I wake up to sunlight through the curtains and the sound of Olivia arguing with Alex about whether she’s allowed to have her phone at breakfast. I lie there, gaze on the ceiling, letting the sounds of everyday life wash over me – the kettle boiling, Alex’s voice low and patient, Olivia’s voice high and indignant, the radio on in the background playing something I half recognise.
Normal. All of it. Beautifully, boringly normal.
I pick up my phone from the bedside table.
There’s a Facebook notification.
My stomach drops before my brain has even caught up, a cold wash of dread running from my throat to my knees.
I unlock the screen and open the app. A friend request. From an account I don’t recognise – no mutual friends, no posts, no cover photo.
The profile picture is small, a thumbnail, and I have to tap on it to enlarge it, and when I do, the room tilts.
It’s me and Ross.
On the street. In the dark. His hand on my jaw, my face tilted up, our mouths pressed together.
The image is grainy and slightly blue, the angle high and wide, and it takes me a second to understand what I’m looking at – security footage, a camera mounted on one of the terraced houses or the wall opposite, capturing the moment in flat, colourless detail.
My coat. His dark jumper. The street light above us. The wet pavement beneath our feet.
My blood goes cold.
I sit up in bed. My hands are trembling so hard the phone rattles against my fingers, and I can hear my own breathing, fast and shallow, filling the quiet of the bedroom. I tap through to the message that came with the request.
There are screenshots. Three of them. Our Facebook messages – mine and Ross’s – cropped and arranged in a sequence that makes them look worse than they are.
His messages about wanting to talk. My earlier replies, from before I blocked him, the brief, cautious ones – I know.
I’m just not sure this is a good idea, and I think about it, too – pulled out of context and lined up to look like a woman deep in an affair, not a woman trying to end one that barely started.
Below the screenshots, a single message.
Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.
The room swims. I read it again. And again. The words stay the same, blunt and flat and terrible, sitting on my screen, a bomb with the timer already running.
I close the app. Open it. Close it. My mouth is dry, and there’s a ringing in my ears. I might throw up right here in my bed, while my husband makes tea downstairs and my daughter argues about screen time and the sun comes in through the curtains as if this is just another Saturday morning.
It isn’t.
I get up, go to the bathroom, lock the door, sit on the edge of the bath, and stare at the phone in my hands. The profile has no name I recognise. No identifying features. Just the photograph, me and Ross frozen in mid-kiss as though evidence in a trial – and the screenshots, and the message.
Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.
Why would Ross do this to me? Why would he go to all the effort of securing a grainy photo and rearranging the screenshots just to torment me? It was him who ruined my life all those years ago, not the other way around. Was he planning this all along?
The thought makes me feel sick. I wrap my arms around myself and press my back against the cold tile of the bathroom wall and try to think, but my brain is moving too fast, skidding over the surface of the panic without getting purchase.
‘Kim?’ Alex calling from the landing. ‘Coffee’s ready. Are you coming down?’
I close my eyes and breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, the way the anxiety app told me to, then I stand up and look at myself in the mirror. Pale. Dark circles. A woman who hasn’t slept properly in a week.
‘Coming,’ I call back, and I sound normal. Like a woman whose biggest problem this morning is deciding between toast and cereal.
I put the phone in the pocket of my dressing gown, and I go downstairs.
Alex hands me a mug. Olivia is eating cereal and scrolling through her phone with one hand. The kitchen is warm, the radio is playing, and everything is the same as it was five minutes ago.
But the phone in my pocket feels as if it weighs a stone. And the message is still there, waiting behind the locked screen, patient and sharp and impossible to ignore.
Meet me again, or Alex gets all of this.
I drink my coffee, smile at my daughter, and I don’t say a word.