Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Cabot Circus on a Saturday afternoon is exactly what I need it to be.
Crowds. Noise. Glass ceiling three storeys high, letting in grey daylight.
Escalators humming, shopping bags rustling, children whining, music bleeding out of shop doorways – the usual chaos of five hundred strangers going about their business with no interest whatsoever in a woman standing outside Marks and Spencer with her hands in her coat pockets and her heart in her throat.
I got here early. Forty minutes early, because I needed to walk the space and get my bearings, to map the exits in my head the way you’d check the fire escapes in a hotel.
I know where the doors are, which corridors lead to car parks and which lead to more shops.
I know that if I keep moving, keep turning, keep threading through the Saturday crowds, there is nowhere in this building where Ross Mercer can corner me.
That’s the theory anyway.
My phone buzzes. A text from Alex: Taken Liv to the cinema. Back around 5. Leftover pasta in the fridge if you’re hungry x
I type back: Thanks, enjoy the film x
Normal. Ordinary. A wife replying to her husband on a Saturday afternoon while she stands in a shopping centre waiting for the man who chased her through the dark a week ago.
My hands are clammy against the phone screen.
I wipe them on my jeans, put the phone in my bag, and glance up at the escalators.
He’s here.
I see him before he sees me. Coming through the main doors, hands in his pockets, dark coat, that walk – unhurried, slightly loose, head turning as he scans the crowd.
He looks different in daylight, in public, surrounded by people with shopping bags and pushchairs.
Smaller, somehow. Less like a threat and more like a man in his late thirties who hasn’t slept well and doesn’t know what to do with his face.
Then he spots me.
His expression changes. Something shifts behind his eyes, a flicker of relief that makes my stomach clench because it’s so obviously genuine.
He weaves through the crowd towards me, and as he gets close, he opens his arms, instinctively, the beginning of a hug that his body has decided on before his brain has caught up.
I step back.
One step. Small, firm, my heel hitting the tiled floor with a sound that gets lost in the noise around us. But he feels it. His arms drop. His face recalibrates – the relief collapsing into something uncertain, confused, and for a second he looks so wrong-footed that I almost feel sorry for him.
Almost.
‘Kim—’
‘Not here,’ I say. ‘Come with me.’
I turn and move into the crowd before he can argue.
I hear him follow – his footsteps falling into pace beside me, slightly too close, adjusting when I speed up – and we walk through the ground floor of Cabot Circus like two people who happen to be heading in the same direction, side by side but not together, not touching, separated by a hand’s width of charged air that neither of us acknowledges.
‘Can we find somewhere to sit down?’ he says after thirty seconds. ‘There’s a coffee place on the—’
‘No.’
‘Kim, I can’t have a conversation while we’re—’
‘We’re not having a conversation. We’re walking.’
He goes quiet. I keep moving – past the escalators, past the phone shop, past a group of teenage girls taking photos of each other outside a make-up counter.
The noise swells and dips around us, a tide of voices and music and the squeak of trainers on polished floors, and I let it float over me because the noise is the point.
The noise is the wall I’ve built between us, and as long as I stay inside it, I’m safe.
Ross tries again near the food court. ‘There are tables upstairs. Busy ones, right in the middle, people everywhere. Just let me buy you a coffee and we can—’
‘I don’t want a coffee.’
‘Tea, then. Water. Anything. I just need five minutes where you’re not walking away from me.’
I stop. We’re near a railing overlooking the lower floor, crowds passing on both sides, a woman with a pushchair squeezing past us with a muttered sorry. Ross stops beside me, breathless, and I can see the effort he’s making to keep his voice level, his body relaxed, his face open.
‘Five minutes,’ he says. ‘That’s all. And then if you want to leave, I won’t follow you.’
I lean on the railing. My pulse is going too fast, and there’s a sour taste at the back of my tongue, metallic, like I’ve been sucking on a coin.
People move past us in both directions – a man carrying three shopping bags, two boys in football shirts, a woman my age with a toddler on her hip – and none of them look at us because there’s nothing to see.
Just two people standing by a railing in a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon.
‘You chased me,’ I say.
His face tightens. ‘I didn’t chase you.’
‘You ran after me in the dark. You tried to open my car door. You pressed your face against the glass.’
‘I was trying to talk to you.’
‘At half seven at night, on a dark lane, running? That’s not trying to talk to someone, Ross. That’s frightening someone. And you frightened me.’
He flinches, his jaw pulling to the left the way it used to when he was fifteen and someone said something he didn’t like.
I remember that flinch. I committed it to memory along with everything else – the way he rubbed his earlobe when he was lying, the way he bounced his knee under desks, the way his voice dropped half a register when he was being serious – as though knowing someone’s physical habits was the same as knowing the person.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he says quietly. ‘I’d been trying to talk to you for days, and you weren’t answering. When I saw you leave the pub, I should have called out. I should have stayed back. I know that.’
‘You shouldn’t have been there at all.’
‘No. You’re right. I shouldn’t.’
The agreement catches me off guard. I’d braced for argument, denial, the smooth deflection he was always so good at – You’re imagining things, Kim, you’re making something out of nothing…
– and instead he’s standing here admitting fault in a public shopping centre while a tinny version of a pop song plays from a speaker somewhere above us.
I don’t trust it.
I push off the railing and set off again. He follows. I turn left at a shoe shop, cut through a cluster of browsers outside a bookshop, and emerge near the glass wall that overlooks the street below. Ross is half a pace behind me, not touching, not speaking, just there.
‘I need to say something to you,’ I tell him, still moving, ‘and I need you to let me finish.’
‘All right.’
‘Don’t interrupt me.’
‘I won’t.’
I stop by the glass wall. Below us, buses pass and pedestrians cross at the lights.
Beyond them, the buildings of Bristol stretch out under a white sky.
I grip the metal railing in front of me and look at the street and not at Ross, because if I look at him I’ll lose the thread of what I need to say.
‘You left,’ I say. ‘When I was seventeen. You disappeared. No goodbye, no explanation, no phone call, no letter. One day you were there and the next you weren’t, and I spent – God, Ross, I spent years trying to understand what I’d done wrong.
Years. Not weeks, not months. Years of replaying every conversation, every argument, every look, trying to find the moment where I broke it, where I pushed too hard or said the wrong thing or failed some test I didn’t know I was sitting. ’
The words are coming faster now. I can feel them stacking up behind my teeth, pressing forward. My voice is shaking, but I don’t stop because if I stop, I’ll never start again.
‘And it changed everything. You changed everything. The way I am in relationships, the way I hold on too tight, the way I flinch every time Alex goes quiet because some part of my brain still believes that silence means someone is about to vanish. I married a man who is solid and dependable and present, and I chose him partly because he was the opposite of you, and even then – even with him – I’ve spent thirteen years waiting for the catch.
Waiting for the morning I wake up and he’s gone. ’
My knuckles are white on the railing. My eyes are stinging.
‘And then you came back. Twenty years later, out of nowhere, a friend request, a photograph, and messages from a blank profile. You walked back into my life as though none of it mattered. As though you could just pick up where you left off. As though the girl you abandoned hadn’t spent years building a life designed to survive without you. ’
Ross opens his mouth.
‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘I’m not finished.’
He closes it.
‘I am married,’ I say. ‘My marriage is not perfect. It’s not what I thought it would be when I was twenty-three, pregnant, terrified, and grateful that someone wanted to stay.
But it is mine. Alex is mine. Olivia is mine.
The house and the routines and the school runs and the Sunday mornings and the arguments about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher – all of it, mine.
And it’s not yours to disrupt, Ross. You don’t get to turn up after two decades and decide that what I’ve built isn’t good enough because it doesn’t include you. ’
A woman brushes past me with a Primark bag. I barely register her. My whole body is trembling – arms, jaw, the muscles in my back – and there are tears on my face now, hot and fast, which I wipe with the heel of my hand without breaking eye contact with the street below.
‘You had your chance,’ I say. ‘You had it and you lost it. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear.
I’m sorry if you came back with some idea that we could – I don’t know – start again, rewrite the ending, pick up the pieces.
But I can’t. I won’t. Because every time I look at you, I see the boy who made me believe I was worth staying for and then proved I wasn’t, and I cannot build anything on that foundation. Nobody could.’
I turn to face him.
He’s standing very still. His hands are at his sides, his coat open, and his face is crumbling, almost, the composure fracturing from the inside, his mouth pressed into a line that isn’t anger or defiance but something rawer than both.
‘Kim,’ he says. ‘Please. If you’d just let me explain why I—’
‘I don’t want your explanation.’ My voice breaks on the last word.
‘I don’t want your reasons or your apology or whatever speech you’ve been rehearsing in your head for the last twenty years.
I want my life back. I want to stop checking my phone.
I want to stop locking every door in my house.
I want to stop looking over my shoulder in car parks and jumping when someone walks behind me in the dark. ’
He takes a step towards me. I take a step back.
‘Leave me alone, Ross.’ I’m barely holding on. ‘Just leave me alone. Please.’
I pick up my bag from where it’s slipped down my arm.
I turn away from him and walk towards the escalators, and I don’t look back.
Not once. Not when I step on to the moving stairs and grip the rubber handrail and feel the steps carry me down towards the exit.
Not when I reach the ground floor and weave through the Saturday crowd with tears still wet on my face, and my lungs still burning with everything I’ve said and everything I haven’t.
I walk out of Cabot Circus and into the cold Bristol air. The noise of the shopping centre cuts off behind me like a door closing, and I stand on the pavement and breathe.
It’s done. I’ve said it. The words are out in the world now, hanging in the air between the escalators and the glass walls and the shoe shops, and they can’t be unsaid.
I should feel lighter.
I don’t.