Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
I need to call someone.
The thought arrives while I’m still sitting on the bottom step with my coat on and my keys digging into my thigh.
Not Alex. Not yet, not like this. But someone.
Someone who can do something, who has the authority to make a man stop following a woman through the dark, stop turning up where he isn’t wanted, stop pressing his face against her car window and trying the handle while she shakes behind the glass.
The police. I should call the police.
I pull up the number for the local station – not 999, because what would I say, there’s a man standing in a road I’ve already driven away from, and he didn’t touch me, didn’t break anything, didn’t technically do anything except walk and jog and say my name through a locked car door?
It’s not an emergency. It’s not a crime, is it?
I don’t even know. I just know my hands are still trembling and my pulse is hammering behind my ears and the hallway feels too narrow and too dark even with the light on.
I find the non-emergency number. I stare at it. My thumb hovers.
Ring them. Just ring them and explain. A man is harassing me. He followed me from a pub. He ran after me in the dark. He tried my car door. I feel unsafe in my own home.
I press call.
It rings three times before someone answers. A woman, calm and professional, the friendly tone of someone who answers phones for a living and has heard everything.
‘Avon and Somerset Police, how can I help?’
‘I – yes, hello. I’d like to report – I’m not sure what to call it. A man followed me tonight. From a pub in Keynsham. He chased me to my car and tried to get in.’
‘All right. Are you safe now?’
‘I’m at home. The doors are locked.’
‘Good. Can I take your name?’
‘Kim. Kim Stiller.’
‘And do you know the person who followed you, Kim?’
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
Do I know him? Such a simple question, and the answer should be simple, too – yes, his name is Ross Mercer, he went to my school, I haven’t seen him in years, and now he’s turned up and won’t leave me alone.
That’s all I’d need to say. One sentence, clean and clear.
The woman on the phone would type it into her system, someone would follow up, and it would be handled.
But it wouldn’t stop there, would it?
Because the next question would be: and what is your relationship to this person?
And I’d say, we were together when we were teenagers.
And she’d say, has he made any threats? And I’d have to say, he sent me a photo.
And she’d say, what kind of photo? And then I’d have to say it.
Out loud. To a stranger on a recorded line.
A photo of me kissing him. Taken recently. After I met him for dinner and walked with him by the river and let him kiss me because for a few stupid hours I forgot who I was and what I had to lose.
And then the woman would ask: does your husband know about this?
‘Kim? Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Sorry. I’m – yes, I know him. He’s – it’s complicated.’
‘Can you give me his name?’
The silence in the hallway presses against me. The front door is solid at my back, the chain on, the lock turned. The television still murmurs in the living room, the fridge hums in the kitchen, and the blood rushes in my ears.
If I give them his name, they’ll contact him.
They’ll speak to him. And Ross will tell them everything – the dinner, the walk, the kiss.
He’ll show them the photo, and they’ll look at it and see a woman who went willingly, who leaned in, who closed her eyes, and the whole thing will shift from a woman being stalked to a domestic mess that a married woman brought on herself.
And Alex will find out. Not from me, in the way I’d choose, with the context and the apology and the desperate hope that he might understand, but from a police officer or a follow-up call or a letter arriving on the doormat.
‘Kim?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I think I’ve – I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake. It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure? If you feel unsafe, we can—’
‘No. Thank you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.’
I hang up.
My hand drops to my lap. The phone screen glows and fades.
And I sit on the bottom step in the hallway and feel the walls close in because I’ve just done the thing I swore I wouldn’t do – I’ve trapped myself.
I can’t tell the police without telling Alex.
I can’t tell Alex without explaining why I was at that dinner, why I let Ross kiss me, why I’ve been keeping all of it locked inside me like something precious instead of something rotten.
I am on my own with this.
The thought turns my stomach. I press my palms against my knees and breathe the way the midwife taught me thirteen years ago when Olivia was coming and the pain was too much and I needed something to hold on to.
It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. My whole body is still vibrating with the memory of Ross’s face at the window, and every time I close my eyes I see the door handle lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping, that small click that meant the only thing standing between me and him was a button I’d pressed half a second before he reached me.
What if I’d been slower?
I stand. I take off my coat, hang it on the hook by the door, carry my bag into the kitchen, and put the kettle on, because that’s what you do, isn’t it?
You put the kettle on. You go through the motions.
You act like a person who is fine until the acting becomes real, and maybe by then you are fine, or at least close enough that nobody can tell the difference.
The kettle boils. I make tea. I wrap both hands around the mug and stand at the worktop and stare at the dark window above the sink. My reflection stares back – white face, wide eyes, hair falling out of its tie – and for a second, I don’t recognise her.
I hear the car before I see the headlights.
The engine note is familiar – Alex’s Audi, the low rumble I’ve heard pull into this drive a thousand times – and then the lights sweep across the kitchen wall, the engine cuts, and I hear the doors open and Olivia’s voice, high and bright, saying something I can’t make out.
They’re home.
I put down the mug. I smooth my hair. I tug the sleeves of my jumper over my wrists because my hands are still shaking, and I arrange my face into something that might pass for relaxed if nobody looks too hard.
The front door opens. The chain tinkles where it catches – I forgot to take it off – and Alex’s voice sails through the gap, patient, somewhat tired.
‘Kim? The chain’s on.’
‘Sorry – sorry, one second.’
I cross the hallway, unhook the chain, open the door, and there they are. Olivia first, barging past me with her rucksack and her phone, smelling of car freshener and someone else’s house.
‘Grandma gave me twenty quid,’ she announces, kicking off her trainers. ‘And Grandad says I’m taller than Auntie Sarah now, which is obviously a lie because Auntie Sarah is massive. But I didn’t correct him because of the twenty quid.’
‘Smart girl,’ I say and sound almost normal. Almost.
Alex follows her in, carrying Olivia’s overnight bag and a Tupperware of something his mum has sent back with them. He sets the bag down by the stairs, puts the Tupperware on the hall table, and looks at me.
‘All right?’ he asks.
‘Fine. Good. How were your parents? I thought you were coming back tomorrow?’
‘We were, but Dad’s hip is playing up again, and he was being grumpy. Mum made a Victoria sponge to compensate. Standard.’ He unzips his jacket. ‘How was the deadline?’
‘Getting there,’ I say, which is a lie so smooth it frightens me. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Go on then.’
He walks past me into the kitchen, and I stand in the hallway for a second, watching Olivia disappear upstairs with her rucksack.
This is what normal looks like. The husband, the daughter, the overnight bag, the Tupperware, the jacket on the hook.
This is the life I built and the life I’m about to blow apart, and right now, standing here with the chain off the door and the kettle still warm, I cannot tell whether I’m protecting it or destroying it by keeping my mouth shut.
The next hour is performance. Pure, exhausting performance.
I make tea and ask about Leicester. I listen to Olivia describe Grandma’s cabbage-scented farts, Grandad falling asleep in front of the football, and the boy next door who she says is annoying but mentions three times.
I nod in the right places and laugh when she does an impression of Alex’s mum fussing over the sponge.
Alex is quiet. Not unusual – he’s often quiet after long drives, the solicitor in him needing half an hour to wind down from whatever he’s been turning over in his head – but tonight his quietness is different.
He watches me across the kitchen table while Olivia talks, and twice I catch him eyeing me with an expression I can’t place.
Not suspicious, not angry. Thoughtful. As though he’s working something out.
My stomach tightens.
‘Right,’ I say at nine o’clock, standing too quickly, smacking my hip on the table edge. ‘Liv, bed.’
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday, and you’ve been in a car for three hours. Teeth, face, bed.’
‘Can I read?’
‘For twenty minutes.’
She goes, grumbling softly, knowing the argument is lost but wanting it on record that she objected. I hear her feet on the stairs, the bathroom door shutting, the tap running. Her bedroom door eventually closes.
The house settles.
Alex is sitting at the kitchen table with his hands around his mug, thumbs pressed against the ceramic.
The Tupperware is still on the hall table.
The overhead light is too bright, turning everything flat and clinical, and the clock on the wall above the cooker is loud – tick, tick, tick – marking time I’m running out of.
I sit opposite him. My mouth is dry. My hands are in my lap, pushed together, fingers laced tight.
‘Alex.’
He looks up.
‘I think we need to talk,’ I say.
His eyes hold mine. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t shift, doesn’t do any of the things I’d expected – the confused frown, the defensive straightening, the cautious ‘about what?’ that would give me space to steer the conversation.
Instead, he puts his mug down slowly, both hands flat on the table, and nods.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I think we do.’
Four words, and the ground seems to open under me.
Because he doesn’t sound surprised.