Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The typing dots are the worst part.
I wake up on Monday to a grey sky pressing against the bedroom window and Alex already gone – his side of the bed cool, his pillow dented, the faint smell of shower gel and toothpaste still hanging in the air.
Olivia is downstairs. I can hear the television, the clink of a cereal bowl, and the muffled thud of her school bag hitting the floor.
For a few seconds I just lie there, staring at the ceiling, letting the sounds of normal life hold me in place.
Then I pick up my phone.
One notification. Facebook. The little red circle sits in the corner of the app like a spot of blood on a clean sheet, and my stomach drops before I’ve even opened it.
The blank profile. The account with no name, no cover photo, no friends – just the security-camera image of me and Ross kissing on a dark street in Bristol, still sitting there as the profile picture, a trophy on a shelf.
A new message.
We need to talk.
Four words. No threat this time, no mention of Alex, no deadline. Just the statement, as if the blackmail message from last week was a perfectly normal way to open a conversation and now we’re moving on to the next stage.
I sit up. My hands are cold, my jaw tight, and my pulse hammers in the soft hollow of my throat. I read the message again. We need to talk. As if we’re old colleagues who’ve had a misunderstanding. As if he hasn’t sent me photographs of my infidelity and threatened to forward them to my husband.
Inside me there’s a shift from fear to anger.
I’ve spent days ignoring him. Days tiptoeing around my house with a locked phone, a sick stomach, and a smile stapled to my face, cooking dinners I can’t taste, laughing at jokes I can’t hear, making the bed with shaking hands and checking the window latch twice before I can sleep.
I’ve been patient. I’ve been careful. I’ve been the good, quiet, obedient version of myself that everyone seems to want me to be – the wife who smiles, the mother who copes, the woman who swallows her terror and gets on with the school run.
I’m done being quiet.
I open the message and type a reply before I can talk myself out of it. My thumbs move fast, fuelled by something hot and reckless that I know I’ll regret later but can’t stop now.
No, we don’t. Leave me and my family alone. I’m not interested in you.
I read it back. Every word is deliberate.
Every word is chosen for the record – because that’s what this is now, a record, a trail of evidence that shows I said no, clearly and in writing, in case this ever gets worse and I need to prove I wasn’t willing.
I press send. The message turns blue. Delivered.
I drop the phone on the duvet, press my palms against my eyes, and breathe.
It’s done. I’ve said what needed saying, and now I wait. Whatever comes next is out of my control, which is terrifying, but at least I’ve put it in writing. At least I’ve drawn the line in ink instead of sand.
The message is read almost immediately. The two blue ticks appear within seconds, and I stare at them, waiting for the reply, waiting for the anger, the threat, the photograph landing in Alex’s inbox.
Nothing comes.
The ticks stay blue. The screen stays still. No typing indicator, no response, no eruption. Just silence, clean and absolute, and I don’t know whether to feel relieved or more frightened than before.
I get up, shower, dress, dry my hair, and put on enough make-up to look like a woman who slept last night.
Today is Olivia’s parents’ day at school – the one they hold twice a year where you sit in a plastic chair and talk to each of her teachers for five minutes and pretend you understand what ‘working at expected standard with emerging greater depth’ actually means.
I promised her I’d be there. Alex can’t make it because of a meeting he couldn’t move, so it’s just me, sitting in a room full of other parents and teachers under fluorescent lighting, giving the social performance school events demand.
I can do that. I’ve been performing all week. What’s another afternoon?
Olivia and I drive to school together. She’s nervous about her maths feedback – ‘Mr Adebayo said my fractions are inconsistent, which basically means rubbish, doesn’t it?
’ – and I tell her it doesn’t, and that inconsistent just means she’s good on some days and less good on others, and that everyone has days like that.
She stares at me as if I’ve said something unexpectedly wise and says, ‘Even you?’ and I say, ‘Especially me,’ and she laughs, and for thirty seconds I feel like a real mother instead of a woman impersonating one.
We arrive at half twelve. The school hall has been set up with tables arranged in a horseshoe, each one labelled with a subject and a teacher’s name.
There are parents milling about with lanyards, paper cups of tea, and the dazed expression of adults who have entered a building designed for children.
I sign in, collect my schedule, and sit on one of the plastic chairs along the wall to wait for our first slot.
I check my phone.
The message is still read. No reply. But as I watch, the typing indicator appears at the bottom of the conversation – three small dots, pulsing in a row, telling me Ross is writing something.
My breath catches.
The dots pulse for five seconds. Ten. Then they vanish.
I stare at the screen. The conversation looks exactly the same as it did before – my message in blue, his silence underneath it – but those dots were there, and now they’re gone, and the absence of them is worse than anything he could have typed, because it means he started and stopped.
He had something to say and chose not to say it. Or he’s choosing his words, waiting.
‘Mrs Stiller?’
I glance up. A woman with a lanyard and a clipboard is smiling at me from behind one of the tables. Olivia’s English teacher. Mrs Calloway, or Galloway, or something with a double L – I’ve met her twice and I still can’t remember.
‘That’s me,’ I say, standing. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’
I sit. Mrs Whatever-her-name-is opens a folder and starts talking about Olivia’s reading comprehension, her creative writing, her ability to analyse character motivation in a year eight text, and I nod and smile and say, ‘That’s great, that’s really good,’ at what I hope are the right moments.
The whole time my phone is in my coat pocket on the chair behind me and I can feel it there, pulling at me, dragging my attention backwards like a hand on my collar.
Is he typing again? Has he replied? Has he sent the photographs to Alex while I’m sitting here talking about Olivia’s use of embedded clauses?
‘Kim?’
I blink. Mrs Galloway – it is Galloway, I can see it on her lanyard now – is looking at me with polite concern.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘What was that?’
‘I was asking whether Olivia reads much at home. She’s mentioned a few books she’s been enjoying, and I just wanted to check she’s got access to—’
‘Yes. She reads all the time. She’s always got a book on the go.’ I smile, and the smile feels tight and wrong, a plaster on wet skin. ‘Sorry, it’s been a long morning.’
‘No need to apologise. She’s a wonderful student. You should be very proud.’
‘I am,’ I say. And I mean it, which makes everything else feel so much worse.
I move from table to table. Maths, science, geography, art.
Each teacher has five minutes, a folder, and a series of observations that I absorb and forget almost instantly, because my brain is somewhere else.
It’s in my pocket, on my phone, watching those three dots appear and disappear in an endless, nauseating loop.
I check between every appointment. I sit, pull out the phone, open the app. The dots appear. My chest tightens. The dots vanish. I lock the screen, put the phone away, and walk to the next table with my hands clenched in my lap and a smile on my face.
He does it five times. Six. Every time, the dots pulse for a few seconds and then disappear, as if he’s writing and deleting, writing and deleting, testing different responses and discarding them one by one.
It’s maddening. It’s the not knowing that grinds me down – the sense that a reply is forming somewhere on the other side of the city, assembling itself word by word, and at any moment it could arrive and change everything.
Or it could be nothing. He could be staring at his phone the same way I’m staring at mine, paralysed, unsure, caught between pushing further and backing off.
Maybe my message worked. Maybe Leave me and my family alone landed the way I intended it to – hard, clear, final – and he’s trying to find a way to respond that doesn’t make him sound like the person he’s becoming.
Or maybe he’s composing something devastating. Something I can’t come back from.
Olivia finds me in the corridor outside the science block, where I’m leaning against the wall pretending to read a display about photosynthesis.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks.
‘Great. Everyone says you’re brilliant.’
‘They don’t say that.’
‘Mr Adebayo said your fractions are improving.’
‘He said they’re inconsistent.’
‘Improving inconsistency is still improving.’
She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. I reach out and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she lets me, which means she’s in a good mood, because on a bad day she’d swat my hand away and say, ‘Mum, don’t.’
‘Can we get a hot chocolate on the way home?’ she says.
‘If you want.’
‘The big one, from the place on the high street. With the marshmallows.’
‘Fine. But you’re not having whipped cream as well. Last time you had whipped cream, you were sick in the car.’
‘I was eleven. My stomach’s matured since then.’
‘Your stomach hasn’t matured. You ate three bags of Haribo last weekend and complained about a tummy ache for the rest of the day.’
She grins. ‘That was different. That was recreational.’
I laugh, and the laughter feels real. The knot in my chest loosens, and I’m just a mum standing in a school corridor talking to her daughter about marshmallows.
In this version Ross doesn’t exist, the phone in my pocket is just a phone, the typing dots are just pixels, and none of it matters as much as this girl in front of me with her wonky ponytail and her blazer sleeves pushed up to the elbows.
Then I feel the phone vibrate.
Just once. A short, soft buzz against my hip, barely perceptible, but it goes through me like a jolt of electricity. My face must change, because Olivia frowns and says, ‘You all right?’
‘Fine. Just my phone.’
‘Aren’t you going to check it?’
‘It can wait.’
It can’t. But I make myself wait anyway, standing there in the corridor with my daughter, talking about hot chocolate and marshmallows and the science teacher’s new haircut.
The phone sits in my pocket, a lit match, and I don’t touch it, because if I look at it now, in front of Olivia, and my face does the thing it did upstairs in the bedroom when I first saw the photograph – the draining, the freezing, the visible collapse of composure – she’ll know something is wrong, and I cannot let that happen.
We do the last two appointments. History, then PE. I smile, nod, shake hands, say thank you, collect a printed report sheet from the table by the door, and walk out of the school with Olivia beside me and the cold November air biting my face and the phone burning through my coat.
In the car, while Olivia fiddles with the radio, I pull it out. There’s a new email from a client, but that’s it.
The dots have gone. No new message. No response. No threat. No photograph forwarded, no screenshots sent, no bomb detonated.
Just the silence. And the ghost of those dots, pulsing and vanishing, pulsing and vanishing.
I put the phone in the glovebox, close it, and start the engine.
‘Hot chocolate?’ Olivia says.
‘Hot chocolate,’ I say.
We drive to the high street and park outside the café.
I buy my daughter a large hot chocolate with marshmallows and no whipped cream, and sit across from her at a small table by the window drinking a tea I don’t taste and listening to her talk about school.
I smile and nod at the right moments, but underneath the table I grip my knees so hard I’ll find bruises there later.
He didn’t reply.
He’s going to reply.
The silence is worse than words, because silence can become anything.
It can become a forwarded photograph, a message to Alex, a knock on the door, a phone call that tears the whole thing open.
Silence is just the gap before the next move, and I don’t know what his next move is, and the not knowing is eating me alive.
We drive home. I carry the school report inside and pin it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a strawberry that Olivia made in primary school.
I cook dinner and load the dishwasher. I check my phone eleven times between five o’clock and bedtime, and every time the conversation looks the same – my message, his silence, no dots, no reply, nothing.
I go to bed with the phone on the bedside table and lie in the dark listening to Alex breathe and waiting for the screen to light up.
It doesn’t.
But I wait anyway.