Chapter 3
Chapter Three
It starts with something small.
The first message arrives on a Tuesday evening while I’m washing up.
Alex is in the living room with his laptop open, Olivia is upstairs doing homework or pretending to, and I’m standing at the sink with my hands in warm water and my phone on the worktop beside me.
It buzzes once, and I glance down, expecting a client email or a reminder about Olivia’s school trip payment. Instead, I see his name.
Ross Mercer.
Hi Kim. Wasn’t sure you’d accept. Really glad you did.
I dry my hands on the tea towel and pick up the phone.
My back is to the doorway. The television is on in the other room, some panel show Alex watches where people shout over each other, and the low murmur of his laugh at something I haven’t heard filters through.
I read the message twice, then type back.
Hi. Honestly wasn’t sure I would either.
I put the phone down, finish the washing-up, and tell myself that’s it. One polite exchange. Two people who used to know each other, saying hello after many years. Nothing to feel strange about. Nothing to hide.
He replies within a minute.
Fair enough. How are you? Stupid question probably, after this long, but I don’t know where else to start.
I smile. I can’t help it. There’s something disarming about the awkwardness of it – the admission that he doesn’t know the rules either, that this is odd territory for both of us. I type back while the water drains and the kitchen goes quiet.
I’m good. Married. Daughter. Freelance designer. All very grown-up and boring. You?
I shouldn’t have added the ‘you’. I know that even as I send it, because ‘you’ is an open door, and open doors are hard to close once someone walks through them.
But I leave it.
Over the next two days, the messages keep coming, and each one arrives a little faster than the last. We swap the basics first – jobs, places, the broad strokes of the years between then and now.
Ross is vague about some of it, which doesn’t surprise me.
He’s living outside Bristol, he says. Working in project management for a construction firm, something practical and unglamorous that he talks about with a shrug I can almost see through the screen.
No wife. No kids. A flat he describes as ‘adequate, if you’re being generous’ that makes me laugh out loud at the kitchen table while Olivia looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
‘What’s funny?’ she asks.
‘Nothing. Just a friend.’
She rolls her eyes and goes back to her cereal.
A flicker of guilt that I can’t explain shivers through me.
I haven’t lied. Ross is a friend – an old one, a distant one, someone from a part of my life that has nothing to do with this kitchen or this family.
But the word ‘friend’ sounds wrong. It doesn’t cover the weight of what we were, and using it is like putting a plaster over something that needs stitches.
By Wednesday evening, the conversation has shifted. The facts run out, and what’s left underneath is memory – and memory is where it gets dangerous.
Ross mentions the old school. The library with the dodgy radiator that clanked like a broken clock every afternoon.
The window round the back of the science block that never latched properly, the one we used to climb through on winter evenings when the building was dark and locked and ours.
I read his messages sitting cross-legged on the bed with Alex in the shower, and feel an excitement that’s been missing from my life for so long.
Do you remember Mrs Alcott catching us in the corridor that time? he writes. Your face. I thought you were going to die on the spot.
I nearly did. She looked at me like I’d committed an actual crime.
To be fair, we had broken in.
Technically, we’d broken in through a window. That’s trespass, not burglary. I looked it up.
Of course you did.
I’m smiling again. That warm, soft, stupid feeling, like slipping into a bath – a feeling I haven’t had in so long I’d forgotten what it does to the muscles in my face.
I glimpse myself in the bedroom mirror, and I look different.
Lighter. Younger. Like I haven’t spent the last five years worrying about money and school fees and whether my husband notices when I’m upset.
I look like the girl I used to be.
Alex comes out of the bathroom, towelling his hair. ‘You all right?’
‘Fine.’ I lock the screen and put the phone on the bedside table. ‘Just checking emails.’
‘At this hour?’
‘My Edinburgh client never sleeps.’
He doesn’t question it. Why would he? I’ve never given him a reason to, and the ease with which the lie slips out makes something cold slide through my stomach. I’ve just lied to my husband about a man I used to love, and it came out as smoothly as asking him to pass the milk.
That should worry me more than it does.
On Thursday, Ross sends a message that stops me mid-sentence in the middle of a design brief I’m working on. I’m at my desk, coffee at my elbow, laptop open, and the notification drops from the top of the screen like a quiet little grenade.
Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer.
I stare at it. My fingers hover over the keyboard, caught between the brief and the phone, between the woman I’m supposed to be and the one who’s been holding her breath for three days.
Go on.
I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. More than I probably should have. And I know this is going to sound mad, but being back here, talking to you again – it’s the first time in a long time anything’s felt right. Does that make sense?
My throat tightens. I read it three times, then once more. Each time the words hit me in a place I thought I’d bricked up, wallpapered over, and learned to live without. Because it does make sense. That’s the problem. It makes more sense than anything has in months.
I type back:
It makes sense.
And then, because I can’t stop myself:
I’ve thought about you, too.
The moment I send it, I want to claw it back.
I sit at my desk with my hands gripping the edge and my heart going like a train, and I think about what I’ve just admitted – not just to Ross, but to myself.
That he’s been there all this time, somewhere underneath the marriage and the mortgage and the routines, like a name scratched into a desk that you keep covering with papers but never quite hide away.
He doesn’t reply straight away. Ten minutes. Twenty. I pretend to work. I adjust the colour balance on a cover file, move a title two millimetres to the left, undo it, redo it, save without changing anything. When the notification finally comes, I almost knock my coffee over reaching for the phone.
Then let me take you to dinner. Somewhere in Bristol, neutral ground, no pressure. Just two people who have years to catch up on.
I put the phone down.
The word ‘dinner’ makes it hard to swallow.
Dinner is not messaging. Dinner is not a harmless exchange of old school stories on a Tuesday night.
Dinner is a table and two chairs and his face across from mine, intimate and real.
Dinner is a thing you’d have to explain if someone asked where you were going, and I already know – without needing to think about it for even a second – that I wouldn’t tell Alex the truth.
Which tells me everything, really.
I stand and walk to the kitchen. I fill the kettle, switch it on, open the fridge, close it again. I lean against the worktop, press my palms flat on the cold worktop, and try to think clearly. But my thoughts are tangled and hot, and I can’t get hold of the right thread.
I shouldn’t go. I know that. I’m married, I’ve got a daughter, I’ve got a life that works – not perfectly, not the way I imagined it would when I was seventeen and sitting on a wall with a boy who smelled of cigarettes, but it works.
Alex is decent. Alex is here. Alex didn’t vanish one day and leave a hole so deep I spent years throwing other people into it trying to fill it up.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Ross vanished, and I never found out why, and the not knowing has been eating away at me for years.
I carried it through university, my twenties, into this marriage.
I’ve told myself it doesn’t matter any more, that I’m over it, and maybe I even believed it until three days ago when his name appeared on my phone and my body remembered what it felt like to lose him.
I want to know why he left.
That’s all I want. Just the answer. Just the missing piece I’ve been walking around without since I was seventeen, so I can finally put it somewhere and stop tripping over the gap.
Is that so terrible?
The kettle clicks off. Steam curls up towards the ceiling and fades. The house is silent – Olivia at school, Alex at work, nobody here but me and a question I’ve been avoiding for two decades.
I go back to my desk and pick up the phone. Ross’s question is still waiting to be answered.
Somewhere in Bristol, neutral ground, no pressure.
I open the message, my thumbs find the keys, and I type one word.
When?
I send it before I can change my mind. Then I lock the screen, put the phone face down on the desk, and press my hands flat against my thighs. I sit there in the quiet of my empty house with my pulse racing and a sick, giddy feeling climbing up from my stomach.
It doesn’t feel like closure.
It feels like a door opening.