Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
It’s been over a week without a text, a missed call, a notification from an unknown number.
Eight days of checking my phone and finding nothing but Alex, Olivia’s school, a client chasing feedback on a cover proof, and a group chat from Olivia’s year about a non-uniform day that seems to have descended into full civil war over whether scrunchies count as accessories.
Normal things. Ordinary things. Things that make up a life when nobody is trying to dismantle it from the outside.
By the ninth day, I start to breathe a bit easier.
By the tenth, I let myself think the thing I’ve been too frightened to think, which is that maybe it’s over.
Maybe the text was just an ugly outburst – Ross losing his temper, lashing out, saying something vile because he could – and now he’s thought better of it and crawled back into whatever hole he came from.
People do that. They flare up and then they burn out.
Even Ross. Even someone who kissed my friend behind the sports hall, vanished from my life without a word, and came back years later like he’d only popped to the shops.
Maybe he’s done.
I don’t believe it completely. There’s a small, stubborn part of me that won’t let go of the dread, that keeps one eye on the door and one ear on my phone and flinches every time I see a figure across the street who’s roughly the right height and build.
But the rest of me – the tired, hopeful, desperate rest of me – leans into the quiet like a warm bath and lets it hold me up.
I pick Olivia up from school, and she tells me about a supply teacher who accidentally projected his Spotify on to the whiteboard, and the whole class saw his Taylor Swift playlist. Her story makes me laugh so hard I have to pull over.
I text Alex a photo of the pasta bake I’ve made for dinner, and he sends back three fire emojis and a heart, which for a man who treats his phone like a fax machine is the equivalent of a love letter.
When a publisher says the cover design I’ve just finished is the best thing I’ve sent in months, I sit at my desk and feel something warm that I think might be pride, or relief, or just the absence of fear, which at this point feels close enough to happiness that I’ll take it.
Friday comes, and I have errands in town.
Olivia is at school, Alex is at work, and I spend the afternoon doing the mundane things that used to bore me rigid and now feel like proof that my life still belongs to me – dry cleaning, the post office, a new light bulb for the landing because the old one’s been flickering for a fortnight and I keep forgetting.
I buy a bunch of flowers from the bucket outside the Co-op because they’re yellow and cheerful and I feel like a woman who buys flowers for no reason.
When I drive home, it’s with the windows cracked, the radio on, and the flowers on the passenger seat looking absurdly optimistic.
Then I pull on to our street, and something snags.
The house looks wrong – the curtains are closed, which is odd because I left them open, but that’s just curtains. But there’s a shadow. It could be a draught, a gust, or a trick of the light. It could be nothing.
Behind the glass in the front door, something moves. A shape, there and gone, the way a person looks when they pass through a hallway quickly and don’t expect anyone to be watching from outside.
My hands go cold on the steering wheel.
I sit in the car with the engine running, stare at the house, and tell myself I’m being ridiculous. It’s a shadow. It’s the light from the kitchen catching the glass. It’s nothing.
But the curtains are closed. Alex isn’t due home for hours, and Olivia is at school.
I pick up my phone and call Alex. It rings four times and goes to voicemail, and my heart drops into my stomach because Alex always picks up when I call.
Always. Even in meetings, even when he’s with a client, he’ll text back within a minute to say he can’t talk.
I call again. Voicemail again. I type a message – Are you home?
I think there’s someone in the house. – and send it and watch the screen and wait.
Nothing.
So why is someone inside my home?
I sit there for another thirty seconds, which feels like thirty minutes, and then I do the thing you’re not supposed to do. The thing that every woman watching a thriller shouts at the screen about. I get out of the car, walk up the front path, and let myself in.
The hallway is dark. I can hear something – a low murmur, a rustle, the creak of a floorboard – and my whole body goes tight with fear that doesn’t let you think, just react. I put my keys between my fingers the way they tell you to online, push open the living room door, and—
‘SURPRISE!’
The noise hits me like a wall. Lights come on, curtains fly open, and suddenly there are people everywhere – laughing, clapping, pouring out of the kitchen and the dining room and from behind the sofa, holding glasses and party poppers and a banner that reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIM in wobbly gold letters that Olivia has clearly made herself because the M is upside-down.
I drop my keys. They clatter on to the wooden floor, and I stand there with my mouth open and my hand still raised in front of me like I’m about to fight someone. The whole room laughs, and Alex pushes through the crowd with the biggest grin I’ve seen on his face in months.
‘Got you,’ he says.
‘I thought—’ My voice cracks. ‘I thought someone had broken in.’
‘I know. Your face.’ He draws me into a hug, tight and warm.
I press my face into his shoulder and let out a breath that feels like it’s been trapped inside me for a week.
‘Happy birthday, love,’ he says.
My birthday isn’t until tomorrow. I’d been expecting a restaurant booking, a card from Olivia, and the usual quiet celebration that comes with turning thirty-eight when you’ve got a teenager, a mortgage, and no particular desire to be reminded.
But Alex has done this – pulled it together early to catch me off guard, roped in half the people I know, and kept it a secret from a woman who has spent the last month on high alert for secrets.
The man is either brilliant or certifiably insane.
Olivia appears at my elbow. ‘Did you see the banner?’
‘I saw the banner. The M is upside-down.’
‘It’s artistic.’
‘It’s upside-down.’
She grins and hugs me, then vanishes into the kitchen where her friend, Phoebe, is apparently already raiding the snack table.
I move through the room, and it’s like stepping into a different version of my life – the version where I’m a normal woman at a normal party surrounded by people who like me and want to celebrate me.
Sarah and Denise from Alex’s office are here, a couple of the mums from Olivia’s school, and my neighbour, Jackie, who I haven’t had a proper conversation with in months.
They hug me and tell me I look well. As I smile and thank them and drink the wine Alex puts in my hand, I feel something I haven’t felt in weeks, which is safe.
Not just safe. Happy. Actually, properly happy, in a way that makes my eyes sting because I’d forgotten what it felt like.
Alex has thought of everything – food laid out on the dining table, a playlist coming through the speaker in the kitchen, the good glasses out, even candles on the windowsill.
He keeps catching my eye across the room and smiling, and every time he does, I feel a pulse of gratitude.
He did this because he loves me. Because he wants to fix what’s been broken.
Because while I was drowning in Ross and the past and my own tangled head, Alex was planning something kind.
I don’t deserve him. I’m not being dramatic. I genuinely don’t.
An hour in, the party has settled into the comfortable noise of people who’ve had enough wine to stop being polite and start being funny. I’m in the kitchen refilling my glass when Alex comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders.
‘Having a good time?’
‘The best.’ I turn around. ‘Thank you. Seriously. I can’t believe you did this.’
‘You needed it,’ he says. ‘We both did.’ He squeezes my shoulders, and then his expression flickers, half pleased, half nervous.
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. I bumped into an old friend of yours in town the other day. Seemed like a nice bloke. I told him about tonight, and he said he’d love to come, so I invited him along. Hope that’s all right.’
My stomach folds in on itself.
‘What friend?’ I say. But I already know. I know before he answers, before he opens his mouth, before the words are even formed. I know the way you know a car is about to crash in the half-second before the impact, when your body understands what’s happening and your brain hasn’t caught up.
‘Ross something. Said he knew you from school.’ Alex smiles. ‘Seemed really pleased when I mentioned your name. Said you two were close back in the day.’
The kitchen tilts. I grip the edge of the worktop. The granite is cold against my palms, and I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, in my wrists, behind my eyes.
‘He’s here?’ I manage.
‘Yeah, came about twenty minutes ago. Said he didn’t want to overwhelm you straight away, so he hung back. Come on, I’ll reintroduce you properly.’
I can’t feel my legs. Alex takes my hand and leads me back into the living room.
I follow because I don’t know what else to do, because saying no would mean explaining everything, and explaining everything would mean watching the warmth drain out of his face, the party collapse around us, and the banner with the upside-down M come crashing down.
So I follow. I smile. I hold my wine glass so tightly I’m amazed it doesn’t shatter.
The crowd shifts. Someone moves aside, and someone else, until there’s a gap. Through it I can see a man standing by the bookshelf with a glass of red wine and a conversation-ready smile that anyone else in this room would read as friendly and warm and completely normal.
‘Here he is,’ Alex says. ‘Kim, you remember Ross?’
Ross steps forward. He’s wearing a dark jumper and jeans, and his face is open and pleasant. His eyes meet mine and hold them with something nobody else in this room can see.
He extends his hand.
‘Kim,’ he says. ‘Happy birthday. It’s been too long.’
He’s inside my house. He’s standing in my living room with my friends and my daughter and my family, and he’s smiling at me with the same vile, grinning mouth that used to kiss me. Back before I realised how evil this man is. Before I learned that he’s capable of stalking.
Now, nobody knows but me.