Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
I shouldn’t open it.
That’s the first thing I think, sitting in the car with the doors locked, the engine off, and rain speckling the windscreen in fat, slow drops that join and slide sideways when the wind catches them.
I shouldn’t open it, because nothing good has ever arrived from an unknown number at a moment like this, and I already know – somewhere deep and sick in the pit of my stomach, somewhere I can’t reason with – that whatever’s waiting on that screen is going to change things in a way I can’t take back.
But I pick the phone up anyway. I turn it over. I look.
The image loads before I can stop it.
It fills the screen – skin and angles and the close, purposeful framing that makes it clear this wasn’t accidental, wasn’t a wrong number, wasn’t meant for somebody else’s wife in somebody else’s car park on a grey Wednesday morning.
It’s a body. A man’s body. Naked from the chest down, shot in a bathroom mirror with the flash bouncing hard off the tiles.
The face is cropped out at the jawline, but that almost makes it worse because the absence feels intentional.
Strategic. This isn’t a picture someone sent in the heat of a moment. This is something aimed.
My stomach lurches, and I drop the phone on to my lap as if the screen has scalded me.
For a few seconds I just sit there, breathing hard, staring at the headrest of the passenger seat because I physically cannot look down.
Rain taps against the roof. The car park is empty except for a silver hatchback two spaces over and a delivery van near the entrance with its hazards blinking.
I’m grateful for the privacy because my face is doing things I can’t control – mouth open, fixed on the headrest, a grimace that keeps twitching between disgust and something closer to raw fear.
I want to throw the phone out of the window. I want to drop it in the footwell and stamp on it until the screen cracks.
Then it buzzes again.
And again.
And again.
I force myself to look. The messages are stacking up underneath the photo, one after another, grey bubbles climbing the screen in a column.
I know where you live Kim
I know which bedroom is yours
The one on the left with the blue curtains
I’ve watched your lights go off
My throat closes. I read the words and read them again, and my brain keeps trying to rearrange them into something manageable – a wrong number, a prank, kids messing about with a pay-as-you-go SIM, some sad bloke who got the wrong end of the stick.
But the blue curtains are right. Our bedroom curtains are blue.
I chose them from John Lewis two years ago because I liked the weight of the fabric, and Alex said they were too dark, and I said they’d fade in the sun, and they have, slightly, along the edges where the light catches them every afternoon.
And this person knows that. Ross knows that.
He’s stood outside my house on my street in Keynsham, looked up at my window, and watched my lights go out.
The idea of it – a figure on the pavement, face tipped upwards, counting seconds until the glow behind the blue curtains disappears – makes me want to be sick.
The messages keep coming.
You think you can keep ignoring me
You think your husband is going to protect you
He doesn’t even know does he
Bet he’d love to hear about the library
Bet he’d love to know what his wife really thinks about when the lights go off
I press my hand over my mouth. The taste of bile is bright and sharp at the back of my tongue. I swallow it down, hard. My eyes are burning, but I can’t look away from the screen because the bubbles are still arriving, and every time I think they’ve stopped, another one drops into place.
I’ve been patient Kim
I’ve been so fucking patient with you
And you treat me like I’m nothing
Like what we had was nothing
You don’t get to do that
The language shifts. I can feel it tipping, the way you feel a car start to slide on ice before the wheels have actually lost the road – the tone moving from accusation into threat, from hurt into something that wants to punish.
The next messages come faster, barely a pause between them, as if whoever is typing has stopped filtering and started hammering.
I could tell him everything
I could send him photos
I could show up at your door and tell your daughter what her mum is really like
How would that feel Kim
How would it feel if Olivia knew
My daughter’s name on that screen.
In that context. Underneath that photo. Underneath those words.
My daughter’s name sitting in a grey bubble as though it’s just another piece of ammunition, another thing to throw.
Something cracks behind my ribs, and I make a sound I wasn’t expecting – a short, hard noise halfway between a gasp and a sob – and I clamp my teeth together and grip the steering wheel until the sound stops coming.
Olivia. Thirteen years old. Sitting in her school right now, in a maths lesson or a science lab, doodling in the margins of her exercise book, checking her phone under the desk when the teacher isn’t looking.
My girl, who hugged me around the waist three days ago and said, ‘Happy birthday, Mum’ into my jumper, whose name is now sitting on my phone underneath a man’s naked body and a threat to ruin her life.
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
I grip the steering wheel with both hands.
My knuckles go white, my arms are shaking badly, and I stare through the blurred windscreen at the trees and the path and the grey sky pressing down on all of it.
I try to breathe – in through the nose, out through the mouth.
The phone buzzes once more against the seat fabric. A single vibration.
I don’t want to look. Every part of me is screaming not to look, to start the engine and drive home and throw the phone in the river as I cross the bridge. But I reach for it because I have to know. I have to see where the bottom is.
Two final messages. Sent together, sitting at the foot of the screen below the rest, as if whoever wrote them paused before typing. Chose the words.
Silence isn’t protecting anyone any more
Especially not you
I lock the phone, put it in the glovebox, and press my palms flat against my thighs. Then I sit very still while the rain hammers down, and the van reverses out past me with its engine rattling.
Is it Ross? What if it’s not? But it has to be. Of course it has to be.
The curtains – he stood in my house three days ago, he could have looked up at the landing window on his way out and clocked the colour.
Olivia’s name – he sat next to her on the sofa and asked her about school, and she answered him, chatty and bright, the way she is with adults she hasn’t decided to be shy around yet.
But the photo. The messages. The venom. I think about Ross in my kitchen with rain on his shoulders and his voice going soft as he said one moment, that’s all I wanted, and I try to fit that man inside the person who sent those words, and I can’t make the shape match.
Ross was gentle. Ross was wounded, and quiet, and bruised, and the look on his face when he said my name was not the look of someone who’d type you don’t get to do that and follow it with a threat to tell my daughter—
But then I think about his hand on my wrist. The way he didn’t let go when I asked. The way his grip was soft, not rough, as if tenderness and control were the same thing to him.
I don’t want it to be him, I know that much, but the evidence is damning, and I can’t keep pretending.
I can’t keep the tiny flicker of hope alive that surely I couldn’t have misjudged someone as badly as I’ve misjudged him.
What does that make me? What does that do to the love story we once shared?
But somebody knows which bedroom is mine.
Somebody has stood outside my house in the dark.
Somebody just sent me a photograph of their body and threatened to destroy my family, and whether it’s Ross or someone connected to Ross, I’m sitting in a car park by the river on my own with no idea what to do next.
I could ring the police. I know I should ring the police – somewhere underneath the panic, the sensible part of me knows that.
This is a crime. Those messages, that photo – there are laws for this, there are procedures, I’ve seen the posters in GP waiting rooms and the adverts on the backs of bus shelters, and I used to read them and think how awful for those women without once – not once – imagining I’d be one of them.
I’d imagine someone younger, or someone who’d been reckless online, or someone whose situation was somehow more obvious, more dramatic, more clearly not their fault. As if there’s a type.
But I can’t ring the police. Not yet. Not before I’ve spoken to Alex.
Because if I call the non-emergency line, they’ll want to see the phone.
They’ll want screenshots, a statement, a timeline.
They’ll ask me who might have sent the messages, and I’ll have to say a name, and the whole thing unspools – the school, the library, the kiss, the Facebook messages I didn’t tell anyone about, the birthday party, the kitchen, the wrist. All of it.
And before any of that reaches a constable’s notebook, it has to reach my husband, or the marriage will be finished.
Not because of what Ross did. Not because of the messages, or the photo, or the threats.
Because I went behind Alex’s back. Because I let a stranger in uniform sit in our living room and tell my husband things about his own wife that I should have told him myself.
The story becomes Kim didn’t trust me enough to come to me first, and Alex would be right.
He’d be completely, quietly, devastatingly right, and I’d have nothing to say to that because it would be true.
So the police have to wait. And Alex can’t.
I open the glovebox and take the phone out one more time.
The lock screen glows up at me – the time, the date, and the photo of Olivia pulling a cross-eyed face at the camera.
I set it as my wallpaper last August when we were on holiday in Dorset, and she was being silly on the beach.
Brown legs, sandy feet, her hair all over the place, laughing so hard her eyes had almost disappeared.
My girl. My brilliant, stroppy, beautiful girl. Whose name is twelve inches away in a message I’ll never be able to unsee.
I’m done. I’m done sitting in car parks, driving in circles, and telling myself I’ll handle this tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the lie I’ve been feeding myself since the first message arrived, and it’s run out.
There’s nothing left of it. Tomorrow is how I ended up here – alone, afraid, and clutching my phone.
Tonight, when Olivia’s in bed, I’m going to sit Alex down at the kitchen table and tell him everything.
Not the edited version. Not the bits I’ve rehearsed in my head while lying awake at three in the morning.
Everything, from the beginning, in order.
The school. The library. The kiss. The love story.
Ross turning up. The party. The kitchen door closing.
His hand on my wrist. And then the messages.
Whatever his face does when I say it – the stillness, the quiet, that terrible silence he goes into when he’s angry, like a door being held shut against something that wants to come through – I’ll take it.
I’ll sit there and I’ll watch it happen and I won’t try to soften it or steer him towards the reaction I want.
He deserves to feel whatever he feels. He’s earned that much, at least.
I start the engine and pull out of the car park, wipers dragging arcs across the glass, the road appearing in wet grey strips ahead of me.
I drive home the long way, past the school, over the bridge, and through the backstreets I don’t usually take.
Because I need the extra minutes. I need to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and my brain fixed on something simple and practical before I walk through my own front door and sit down with the truth.
My phone stays in the glovebox. I don’t want to touch it again.
But I can feel it in there. Waiting.
I have to tell him tonight, before this gets worse.
I think it’s already worse than I know.