Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
He finds me when I’m alone.
I’ve slipped into the kitchen to fetch more paper plates and a roll of bin bags because somebody’s knocked Ribena across the tablecloth. My head’s in the cupboard, and I’m rooting behind the baking trays, and when I turn around Ross is standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
My stomach drops through the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
He doesn’t answer straight away. He glances back over his shoulder towards the living room, where Alex is talking over the music, Olivia’s shrieking about something, and there’s the heavy thump of one kid jumping off the sofa.
He steps inside and lets the door swing shut behind him. The latch catches with a soft click.
The noise from the party dims to a muffled beat of bass and laughter.
‘I just want to talk,’ he says.
‘Then talk in there.’ I nod towards the door. ‘With everyone else.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
I put the plates down on the worktop because my hands have started trembling and I don’t want him to see.
The kitchen smells of warm cake and tuna sandwiches, and the fluorescent strip light above the sink is buzzing the way it always does when it’s been on too long.
A stack of birthday cards is propped against the toaster.
A half-empty bottle of Prosecco is sweating a ring on to the worktop.
Everything about this room is mine. My house. My kitchen. My family behind that wall.
So why does it feel like I’m the one trespassing?
‘Ross,’ I say, and I keep my tone low because Alex is barely twenty feet away, ‘you need to leave me alone.’
He tips his head, and there it is, that look he used to give me when we were sixteen and I’d said something he thought was funny but wouldn’t admit to finding funny. Half a smile. One side of his mouth. It used to make me feel like the cleverest person in the room.
Now it makes me feel sick.
‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ he says. ‘I came because I was invited.’
‘You were invited to the party, but you didn’t have to come. And I don’t want you in here.’ I hate that my voice is wobbling.
‘It’s a kitchen, Kim. People go into kitchens.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Make me sound ridiculous.’
He drops the half-smile, and for a second he just looks at me. Not charming, not guarded. Just looking, the way you’d look at someone across a waiting room when you’ve both been there too long.
‘I’m not trying to make you sound anything,’ he says. ‘I came today because I wanted to talk to you. That’s it. Five minutes, then I’ll go back in there and eat cake and clap along and leave when everyone else does.’
‘You shouldn’t have come at all.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Why have you been doing this to me?’
‘Doing what?’
I shake my head, anger replacing fear. ‘You know what! The messages, the threats, the following me in the dark! You realise I’m one step away from calling the police?’
The confusion on his face disarms me.
‘Threats? What are you talking about, Kim?’ He shakes his head. ‘And I’ve apologised for that night in town. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’d never want to scare you.’
‘Stop it,’ I say, trying to stay resolute but faltering in the face of his act. God, he’s good. He’s almost convinced me I’ve imagined the past few weeks. But the evidence is right there on my phone.
We stand there, and I can hear the party carrying on through the wall – someone turning the music up, a child I don’t recognise squealing, Olivia’s voice cutting through it with that sharp laugh she does when she’s showing off for her friends.
My daughter. Growing up so fast it makes my heart hurt when I think about it, and I should be in there with her right now, not in here with the one person who could blow my entire life wide open if I let him get close enough.
I should walk past him. Open the door. Go back in. Light the candles. Be a mum.
But my feet won’t move.
‘What do you actually want, Ross?’ I say. ‘This has to stop. All of it. Because I’ve told you. More than once. There’s nothing left to talk about.’
‘You keep saying that.’
‘Because it’s true.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
He pushes off the door frame and moves closer, and the worktop presses into the small of my back before I’ve made a conscious decision to lean away.
He doesn’t come too close. He stops by the table and rests his fingers on the back of a chair.
His coat is still on, and I can see rain on the shoulders from where he must have walked up the drive.
He looks tired. Any attempt at charm is gone, replaced by exhaustion and an appearance of being worn through, like he’s been carrying something heavy for so long his arms have gone numb and he’s forgotten what it was like to put it down.
‘One moment,’ he says quietly. ‘That’s all I wanted. One moment with you, without—’ He gestures towards the wall, towards the noise, towards all of it. ‘Without everyone.’
My blood goes cold.
‘Don’t,’ I say.
‘In the library,’ he says. ‘Our first kiss. You remember it, Kim.’
I stare at him. My lungs are so tight I can barely draw a full breath. The strip light buzzes and buzzes.
‘And you know what we had was special,’ he says. ‘You’ve always known.’
The absolute worst part, and I hate myself for thinking it – is that he’s right.
I have always known. I’ve carried that first kiss around for years like a stone in my pocket, turning it over when I’m alone, smoothing the edges in my mind until it fits perfectly into the gap that nothing else has filled.
Not the wedding. Not Olivia’s birth. Not the good years with Alex, and there have been good years, I’m not pretending there haven’t.
But that first kiss sits underneath all of it, quiet, small, and stubborn, and it won’t go away no matter how many times I tell myself it should.
But that doesn’t make it all right.
‘We broke up twenty years ago,’ I say.
‘I know.’
‘We were children.’
‘We weren’t, though.’ He’s so gentle it makes me want to scream. ‘We were old enough to know what we were doing.’
‘Old enough to know what, exactly?’ I fold my arms, because if I don’t I’ll grab the worktop edge again and I refuse to let him see me bracing myself.
‘We were kids, Ross. Kids do stupid things, then they grow up and get on with their lives, and that’s what I’ve done.
I’ve got a husband in that room. I’ve got a daughter who’s eating too many sweets and enjoying my surprise party.
I’ve got a life that has nothing to do with you. ’
He doesn’t flinch. I want him to flinch.
I want him to look stung, or angry, or caught out – something I can use to remind myself that I’m doing the right thing by pushing him away.
But he just stands there with his fingers on the chair back, watching me, and his face is so still that I can’t make head nor tail of what he’s thinking.
‘I know you do,’ he says. ‘I’m not asking you to give any of that up.’
‘Then what are you asking?’
‘I’m asking you to stop pretending we didn’t happen.’
‘I’m not pretending anything.’
‘Kim.’
‘I’m not.’
But even I can hear how thin my voice sounds. Even I know.
Ross lets go of the chair and takes a step closer.
He’s near enough now that I can smell his aftershave, and for a horrible, lurching second, I want him.
Despite the threats, the terror, and all the disruption he’s brought into my life, I want him.
I want to feel his mouth on mine again, feel that unique buzz of being the sole focus of Ross Mercer’s gaze. What the hell is wrong with me?
I blink, and I’m back. Strip light. Birthday cake. Ribena stain.
‘I have to go,’ I say and move to step past him towards the door.
His hand catches my wrist.
His touch isn’t hard or rough. Just enough to stop me, his fingers closing around the bone, and I freeze mid-step with my breath trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat.
The party thumps on through the wall. Someone laughs – Alex, I think.
My husband is laughing in the next room while another man holds my wrist in my own kitchen and I can’t move.
‘Let go of me,’ I say.
He doesn’t.
‘Kim, please—’
‘Let go of me, Ross.’
His grip isn’t painful, but it doesn’t need to be.
His thumb is resting against the inside of my wrist, right on the pulse point, and he must be able to feel it – how fast it’s going, how hard my heart is hammering – and that’s worse than if he’d grabbed me roughly.
Worse because it’s gentle. Because it’s the touch you give someone you care about, and I don’t want his care.
I don’t want his tenderness. I don’t want anything from him except for him to be a memory I can fold up and put in a drawer and never think about again.
But he’s here. He’s real. He’s standing in front of me with his hand on my wrist and my husband on the other side of a wall, and I’m frightened.
Not of him.
Of what I might do if he doesn’t let go.
‘Please,’ he says, and there’s something raw in his voice that I don’t want to hear. ‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I never—’
The door bangs open.
It happens so fast I barely register what’s coming before the sound fills the kitchen like a wave – Olivia first, bouncing through the doorway with her hands already reaching for the cake, then Alex right behind her carrying the lighter he’s been hunting for, then a flood of kids and parents pouring in from the living room, jostling and elbowing and all of them singing at the tops of their voices.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you—
Ross drops my wrist. He steps back towards the worktop.
I step sideways towards the sink. And by the time Alex reaches the table and starts clicking the lighter over the candles – swearing quietly when the first one won’t catch – there’s a good three feet of empty kitchen between me and Ross, and we’re both smiling.
I’m smiling so hard my face aches.
Happy birthday, dear Kim—
Olivia is beaming, her cheeks flushed pink with pride at the cake she’s made me, her friends packed in behind her.
One of them is filming on her phone. Alex gets the last candle lit and holds his hands up like a conductor, and the whole room bellows the final line.
I smile at them all and try to look happy, and something cracks open inside my ribcage because this is it.
This is my life. This is the thing I chose, the thing I built, the thing I should want more than anything.
And I do want it. I do.
‘Make a wish!’ someone shouts.
I lean forward, my hair swinging across my face, and blow. The candles go out all at once in a curl of pale smoke that drifts between us and dissolves against the ceiling.
Everyone claps. The kitchen is full of bodies, noise, and warmth. Olivia is already pulling the candles out of the icing with her fingers, and Alex is rooting through the drawer for the big knife. One of the dads is making a joke about needing the fire brigade, and nobody is watching me.
Nobody except Ross.
He’s by the door, a paper cup in his hand that I didn’t see him pick up, watching everyone else clap, his face arranged into the pleasant half-smile of a family friend who’s happy to be here.
And as I watch, he lifts the cup a fraction – barely a toast, the smallest movement – and his eyes find mine across the crowded kitchen.
I look away first.
I always look away first.
‘Right then,’ Alex says, pressing the knife into the sponge, ‘who wants a corner bit?’
I take the stack of plates from the worktop and start handing them round, and my hands are steady, and my smile is holding, and when Olivia grabs me around the waist and says ‘Happy birthday, Mum’ into my jumper, I pull her in tight and press my mouth against the top of her head and close my eyes.
I can still feel my pulse beating beneath his thumb.
I can still feel it telling him everything I refused to say.