Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
I can’t stop thinking about his hand on my wrist.
It’s all I’ve been able to think about since I stood in my kitchen and let Ross Mercer get in my head while my husband lit candles on my birthday cake a few feet away, and I haven’t slept properly since.
I lie awake next to Alex, stare at the ceiling, and run through it over and over – the click of the kitchen door, the smell of rain on his jacket, the way his thumb settled against my pulse point as if he already knew exactly what he’d find there – and every time I get to the part where the door bangs open and everyone comes flooding in, my body jerks like I’ve been caught falling in a dream.
I should feel relieved. I wasn’t caught. Nobody saw.
But all I feel is dread.
Because Ross was in my house. He stood in my living room and talked to Alex about rugby.
He accepted a glass of wine and laughed at something one of the dads said, and Alex didn’t think twice.
Why would he? As far as Alex knows, Ross is someone I went to school with a hundred years ago – someone who turned up to a party because Keynsham is small and people know people, and that’s just how it works.
Alex shook his hand. Alex poured him a drink.
Alex stood three feet away from the man who’d had his fingers around my wrist thirty seconds earlier, and he didn’t notice a thing.
And neither did Olivia.
That’s the part that makes me feel physically ill.
The fact that my thirteen-year-old daughter sat on the sofa next to Ross for a full five minutes while he asked her about school, and I watched from across the room with a plate of cake in my hand and a smile welded to my face, and I couldn’t do a single thing about it without blowing everything apart.
So I’ve started avoiding the house.
It sounds ridiculous when I put it like that – a grown woman avoiding her own home – but the truth is, I don’t feel safe in it any more.
Not from Ross, exactly. I don’t think he’s going to kick the door down.
But I keep finding myself at the front window, pulling the curtain back an inch and scanning the street.
Every car I don’t recognise has my pulse jumping, and every time the doorbell goes, I have to force myself not to freeze in the hallway.
It’s exhausting. It’s like being on guard duty in your own life, and I can’t keep it up, so instead, I leave.
I drop Olivia at school and I don’t come home.
I drive to the retail park and sit in the car park with the engine off, watching people load bags into boots and push trolleys and argue with their kids, and I try to think clearly, and I can’t.
I walk through town and buy things I don’t need – a candle, a packet of socks, a magazine I’ll never open – because the act of choosing something and paying for it and carrying a bag makes me feel like a person with a normal life doing normal things.
In a café, I order coffee I don’t finish, stare at my phone and wait for it to buzz with a message from a number I don’t know.
Because that’s what I’m expecting. That’s what I’m preparing myself for.
Ross found my house. He walked into my birthday party, put his hand on me, and told me I knew what that kiss meant.
Then, when everyone sang, he smiled and lifted his paper cup in a toast that only I could see.
A man like that doesn’t just stop. He doesn’t take no for an answer and walk away and leave you in peace, because that’s not what any of this is about for him.
He wants me to know he’s there. He wants me to feel him circling.
And I have no idea how to make it stop.
I think about calling the police while I’m sitting in the Sainsbury’s car park on the second morning, watching rain slide down the windscreen and picking at the skin around my thumbnail.
I could ring the non-emergency number. I could explain that an ex-boyfriend has wormed his way into my home, that he put his hand on me, that I feel unsafe.
They’d take my details, ask me questions.
They’d want to know if he’s threatened me, and I’d have to say I think so, but I can’t prove it’s him.
Then they’d ask if there are any witnesses, and I’d have to say no, there aren’t, because nobody has seen him come near me, and technically the messages I’ve received could have been from anyone.
And then they’d ask about our history, and the whole thing would spill out like water across a table.
I can’t do it. Not yet. Not like that.
Because before I can tell strangers, I have to tell Alex.
That’s the order it has to go in. I don’t know much about what the right thing is any more – I’ve lost track of it, honestly, somewhere between the first Facebook message and the kitchen door clicking shut – but I know that much.
If I go to the police before I go to my husband, then Alex finds out about Ross from a constable or a phone call or a form with my name on it, and that becomes the story.
Not that Ross frightened me. Not that I was trying to keep my family safe.
The story becomes that I went behind Alex’s back – again – and that I involved the authorities before I trusted him enough to tell him the truth.
And he’d be right to think that. He’d be absolutely right.
So the police can wait. But Alex can’t wait forever either, and every day I put it off, the lie gets bigger, and the gap between what he thinks is happening and what’s actually happening gets wider. I can feel it stretching under my feet like ice on a pond, thin and creaking.
I just don’t know how to say it.
What would I even tell him? Alex, do you remember Ross from the party?
The one you gave wine to? The one who asked Olivia about her GCSEs?
He’s my ex-boyfriend. He kissed me when I was fourteen in the school library, and I’ve never quite got over it.
And now he’s turned up out of nowhere, and I think he’s following me, and also he grabbed my wrist while you were finding the cake lighter, and I didn’t pull away fast enough because for a second – just one second – I didn’t want to.
I can hear Alex’s voice in my head already.
The quietness. The very still way he goes when he’s angry – not loud, never loud, but contained, like something pressurised that hasn’t found its outlet yet.
He’d ask me why I didn’t tell him sooner.
He’d ask me what else I’ve been keeping from him.
He’d look at me with those careful, tired eyes, and I’d see the exact moment his face changed from concern to suspicion, and I wouldn’t be able to blame him for it.
Because I have been keeping things from him.
That’s not even a question. I’ve kept Ross’s messages and his voice and the feeling of his hand on my skin locked inside a part of me that Alex doesn’t have access to.
Whether I did it to protect my marriage, or to protect myself, or simply because I’m too much of a coward to face the mess it would make, the result is the same.
I’ve been lying by omission, and I know it.
On a rainy midweek morning, I drive out past the school and park near the river path, because it’s the only place I can think of where the air doesn’t feel like it’s pressing down on my skull.
The rain has stopped, but the sky is flat and grey, and the path is muddy.
I walk for twenty minutes without seeing anyone except an older woman with a terrier who nods and passes without speaking.
The river is high and brown with run-off.
I stand at the metal railing by the footbridge and watch a crisp packet turn circles in the current.
For a few minutes my head goes quiet and I can breathe properly for the first time in days.
I tell myself I’ll speak to Alex tonight.
I’ll send Olivia to bed, sit him down, and I’ll start from the beginning and tell him everything.
Whatever happens after that is what happens.
No more hiding. No more watching the street through the curtains.
No more sitting in car parks like a fugitive from my own house.
I can do this. I can.
I turn back along the path, and I’m almost at the car when my phone buzzes in my coat pocket.
I stop. Take it out. The screen is wet from the drizzle, and I wipe it on my sleeve before I look.
It’s a text. Unknown number. No name. Just a mobile I don’t recognise, and a message underneath it.
My hand goes to my mouth. The phone feels suddenly very heavy, as if the weight of the words has made it denser.
I tighten my fingers around it until the case bites into my palm.
The path is empty. The river is loud. There’s nobody here to see my face, and I’m grateful for that because I can feel the colour draining out of it, can feel the blood pulling back from my cheeks and my lips and rushing somewhere deep and panicked inside my chest.
I look up at the car park, at the three other cars sitting in their spaces, at the hedgerow, at the road beyond. Everything is still. A bird lifts from the railing and wheels away over the water.
My phone buzzes again. Same number.
I don’t read the message. Not yet. I’m not ready.
I get into the car and lock the doors and sit with the phone face down on my thigh and both hands on the steering wheel and my breath coming fast and shallow, and I stare through the windscreen at the flat grey sky and the dripping trees and the empty path, and I think: So this is it. This is how it starts.
I was wrong about telling Alex tonight.
I was wrong about having time.