Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The first thing I do on Sunday morning is block him.
The blank profile, the faceless square, the account he made to reach me after I’d shut the first door. I find it in my message requests, tap the three dots in the corner, and press block. A confirmation box appears: Are you sure you want to block this user?
Yes. God, yes.
I press confirm, and the conversation vanishes.
The screen refreshes, and the blank profile is gone, wiped from my inbox as though it never existed.
I stare at the empty space where it used to be, and something shifts inside me.
A loosening. A knot that’s been pulled tight for weeks giving half a turn in the right direction.
I put the phone down on the kitchen worktop and pick up my tea.
It’s barely seven. The house is quiet – Alex asleep upstairs, Olivia dead to the world in her room with her door closed and curtains drawn, the Sunday-morning stillness that I used to love and have spent the last fortnight dreading because silence gives my brain too much room.
But today the silence feels different. Today it feels earned.
I told him to leave me alone, now I’ve blocked him, and those two things together – the words and the action – feel like a wall.
Not a locked car door, or a crowded shopping centre, or the chain across the front door at night, but something bigger.
A line drawn. A decision made and followed through.
For the first time since that friend request appeared on my screen, I have done something instead of reacting to something, and it feels good.
I carry my tea to the kitchen table and sit down.
The morning light is coming through the window above the sink – pale, thin, the washed-out grey of winter – and the garden beyond is wet with dew, the grass long enough that Alex will mention the mower later, the fence at the back leaning where the post rotted through last winter. Ordinary things. My things.
I sip my tea and breathe, letting the ordinary press in around me.
Yesterday I said everything I needed to say.
And he stood there and took it.
That’s the part I keep coming back to, even though I don’t want to.
The way his face crumbled. The rawness behind his eyes when I said you had your chance, and you lost it.
The step he took towards me that I matched with a step backwards, and the way his arms stayed at his sides, palms open, as though he was physically stopping himself from reaching for me.
I push the image away. It doesn’t matter how he looked or what he felt.
What matters is that I said the words, then I walked away, came home, and blocked his account.
And now the channels are closed. Facebook gone.
No phone number exchanged. No email, no address, no mutual friends who might pass a message on.
The only way Ross Mercer can reach me now is by turning up in person, and after yesterday – after standing in a public place and hearing me tell him plainly to leave me alone – surely even he wouldn’t do that.
Would he?
Stop it. Don’t go there. Don’t pick at the wall five minutes after building it.
I wipe down the worktop even though it doesn’t need wiping, unload the dishwasher and put everything away in the right cupboards.
The small domestic rhythm of folding the tea towel and hanging it over the oven handle steadies me the way it always has – hands busy, brain quiet, the world reduced to cups and plates and the satisfying clink of things being put where they belong.
By the time Alex comes downstairs at half eight, I’m almost calm.
‘Morning.’ He’s rumpled, yawning, in joggers and a T-shirt, his hair sticking up at the back. He goes straight to the kettle. ‘Sleep all right?’
‘Not bad, actually. Better than I have done.’
He glances at me. One of the quick, assessing looks he’s been giving me since Friday night when we sat at this table and he told me he loved me. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’
‘Is Olivia up?’
‘Not a chance. I stuck my head in. She’s got the duvet over her face and the curtains are shut. We’ve got an hour at least.’
He makes his tea and sits opposite me. For a few minutes, we exist in the comfortable, unremarkable silence of two people who’ve been married long enough to share a kitchen without needing to fill it with words.
Alex scrolls through something on his phone.
I stare at the garden. The fridge hums. The boiler clicks.
This is what I nearly lost. This is what I’m fighting to keep.
I spend the morning doing the things I would normally do on a Sunday.
Laundry – the basket has been overflowing for three days, and I sort it on the utility room floor, lights and darks, checking pockets for tissues and coins.
Olivia’s school shirt has a stain on the collar that won’t shift without a soak, so I fill the sink and leave it.
I hoover the living room. I strip the beds and put fresh sheets on, wrestling with the duvet cover, one corner first, shake, swear under my breath, try again.
Normal. All of it. Tediously, beautifully normal.
Olivia surfaces around ten and stands in the kitchen doorway with her hair in a bird’s nest and her pyjama bottoms trailing under her heels. ‘Can I have pancakes?’
‘There’s cereal.’
‘But it’s Sunday.’
‘Cereal, Liv.’
She pours herself a bowl of something chocolatey and sits at the table with her phone propped against the milk carton, watching a video with the sound tinny and too loud.
I don’t tell her to turn it down because the noise is welcome, the normality of it, the thirteen-year-old-on-a-Sunday-morning ordinariness.
Alex mows the lawn after lunch. The mower coughs to life in the garden, and I watch him through the kitchen window, pushing it back and forth in careful lines, pausing to pull a stick out of the blades, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
Olivia is in her room. The house smells of clean sheets and the roast I’ve put in for later, lamb with rosemary, Alex’s favourite, a peace offering disguised as a Sunday dinner.
By three o’clock, I’ve almost convinced myself.
It’s over. Ross got the message. The account is blocked, the words are said, the line is drawn.
He’ll go back to wherever he came from – wherever he’s been for the last twenty years – and I’ll stay here, in this house, with this family, and we’ll mend the cracks and fill the silences and be fine.
Better than fine. We’ll be what we were before he came back, or close enough that the difference won’t show.
I believe it. I need to believe it. And for a few bright, fragile hours on a Sunday afternoon, with lamb in the oven and clean sheets on the beds and my husband’s mower droning in the garden, I do.
My phone buzzes at ten past three.
I’m standing at the kitchen worktop, chopping carrots.
The knife is in my right hand, the chopping board is wet, and my phone is on the worktop beside me, face up, because I stopped hiding it from Alex this morning as part of the new regime – the open, honest, nothing-to-see-here version of myself that I’m building from the ground up.
The screen lights. A notification banner slides down from the top.
Text message from Unknown Number.
My hand stills. The knife remains in the carrot, the blade pressed into the flesh without pushing through. I stare at the notification with a feeling I can only describe as tilt – the floor shifting beneath me, the kitchen rearranging itself around a new centre of gravity.
It’s nothing. It’s a spam message. PPI, a delivery notification, or one of those automated texts from the dentist reminding me to book a check-up. I get them all the time. Everyone gets them.
I put down the knife. I pick up the phone and tap the notification.
The message opens.
My eyes track across the words once, quickly, the way you scan a headline before your brain registers what it says. Then they track back to the beginning and read it again, slower this time, each word arriving separately, like stones dropped into still water.
You don’t get to walk away from me, you fucking bitch.
The kitchen goes very quiet.
Not actually quiet – the oven is still humming, the mower is still droning outside, the clock is still ticking above the cooker. But something in my head has gone quiet, a sudden vacuum, as though my brain has thrown a switch and sealed off everything except the words on the screen in front of me.
I read it again.
You don’t get to walk away from me, you fucking bitch.
My hands are shaking, vibrating from the shoulder down, the phone rattling against my fingers. I grip it tighter, and the shaking gets worse, spreading into my chest, my jaw, the backs of my knees.
The mower stops outside. Alex swears then it starts again, the steady back-and-forth hum resuming as though nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed for him. He’s out there mowing the lawn in his old trainers with grass clippings on his shins, thinking about the roast and the rugby scores and whether the fence post needs replacing before winter.
He doesn’t know. He can’t feel what I’m feeling, this sick cold spreading through my chest and down into my stomach, this taste in my mouth like metal and old pennies, this absolute certainty that the wall I built this morning was made of paper and Ross Mercer has just put his fist through it.
He found another way.
I said the words to his face in a public place. I blocked every account. I closed every channel, and then I came home and shut the last digital door, and I thought – I genuinely, stupidly thought – that would be enough.
It wasn’t enough. He has my number. I don’t know how – I never gave it to him, not the new one, not this phone – but he has it, and he’s used it, and the message sitting on my screen is so far from the wounded, confused man who stood in Cabot Circus yesterday with his arms at his sides and his face falling apart that I feel dizzy trying to reconcile the two.
You don’t get to walk away from me.
As though I belong to him. As though walking away is something I need his permission for.
You fucking bitch.
I’ve never heard Ross swear like that. Not at me, not at anyone. Even as a teenager, even when he was angry, he kept his language clean, clipped, controlled – the words always chosen, never spat. This doesn’t sound like him. This sounds like someone else. Someone I haven’t met yet.
Or someone I’ve been refusing to see.
I lock the phone and slide it across the worktop, away from me, as though the distance will stop the words from being real.
Then I stand at the chopping board with the knife in my hand and the half-cut carrot in front of me, stare at the wall, and try to breathe.
I can’t. My lungs won’t expand properly, my ribs feel like a cage that’s shrunk two sizes, and the air is right there, but I can’t get it in.
The back door opens.
‘Kim?’ Alex, wiping his boots on the mat. ‘Have we got any bin bags? The green bin’s overflowing, and I need to—’
‘Under the sink.’ I sound wrong, the words pushed through a space that’s too narrow.
He crosses the kitchen behind me. I hear the cupboard open, the rustle of the bin-bag roll, the cupboard closing.
He pauses. I can feel him behind me, not touching, just standing there, and I know he’s noticed something – my posture, the knife motionless on the board, the rigid set of my shoulders – because Alex always notices. He just doesn’t always ask.
‘You all right?’
‘Fine. Just tired.’
A beat. Then: ‘Right. I’ll finish up outside.’
The back door closes. The mower starts again.
I pick up the phone. I read the message one more time, slowly, letting every word sink in.
Then I lock it, slide it into my pocket, and pick up the knife and finish cutting the carrots.
My hands are trembling so badly that I nick my thumb on the blade, and a thin line of blood wells up along the skin and drips on to the chopping board, red against orange.
I rinse it under the tap, wrap a plaster around it, and carry on.
Because that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.
Carry on, keep moving, act normally, smile when someone walks in, say fine when someone asks.
And behind the smile, behind the fine, behind the plaster on the thumb and the lamb in the oven and the clean sheets on the beds, the words sit in my pocket and pulse like a second heartbeat.
You don’t get to walk away from me, you fucking bitch.
He isn’t finished.