Epilogue
The email arrives at six in the morning.
I’m awake because I’m always awake at six now – something broke in my sleep pattern the night of the school and hasn’t mended.
I lie in the dark and listen to Alex breathing and wait for the light to come through the curtains.
When my phone buzzes on the bedside table, I pick it up without thinking, the way you pick up anything that interrupts the silence.
The sender is a name I don’t recognise. A woman. The subject line is two words: Ross Mercer.
I sit up in bed. My thumb hovers over the screen.
Alex shifts beside me, rolls on to his side, settles.
I should put the phone down. I should leave it until I’ve had coffee, until I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the daylight on my face and the kettle boiled.
But my thumb is already moving, the email is already open, and the first line is already in my head.
My name is Catherine Mercer. Ross was my brother. I have something you need to see before the police and the press see it.
My blood goes cold.
I read the rest standing in the bathroom with the door locked and the shower running so Alex can’t hear me if I make a sound.
Catherine Mercer. I’d forgotten Ross had a sister.
I’d filed it in the part of my memory I don’t visit.
She writes plainly, without emotion, the way someone writes when they’ve rehearsed it so many times the feeling has been sanded off.
She says Ross left a package with her before the night at the school – a hard drive, a USB stick, printed screenshots, and a video he recorded on his phone.
She says he told her: If anything happens to me, send this to everyone.
She says she’s spent the last month deciding whether to do it.
She’s decided.
The package has already gone to his solicitor and police. The email to me is, she says, a courtesy. She wants me to know what’s coming before it arrives.
There’s a link at the bottom. A cloud folder, password-protected. The password is in the email.
I click it.
The folder opens, and my legs go weak. I sit down on the edge of the bath and scroll. With every file I open, the bathroom gets smaller, the air gets thinner, and the sound of the shower becomes a roar that fills my skull.
Screenshots. Dozens of them. Messages between me and Ross, every exchange, timestamped and dated.
But not just our messages – screenshots from accounts that sent explicit photographs and messages so vile I can barely read them.
And beside each one, metadata. IP logs. Device information.
Traces that lead back, link by link, to a single source.
Me.
The phone nearly slides into the bath. I grip it with both hands and keep scrolling.
There are more screenshots – my messages to Ross from the early weeks, the ones I sent late at night when Alex was asleep, the ones where I pushed and pushed for another meeting, another drink, another hour alone.
I remember writing them. I remember the heat of it, the thrill, the sense that I was reclaiming something that had been taken from me.
And I remember what happened when Ross pulled back – the polite refusal, the careful distance, the message that said Kim, I think we should leave this where it is – and the fury that came after.
The fury I told myself was fear.
And there is CCTV. A video file from a security camera on the side street near the restaurant where we had dinner.
The clip is grainy, timestamped, and unmistakable.
It shows Ross walking away after the kiss.
It shows me standing on the pavement for three or four seconds.
And then it shows me running after him – actually running, my coat flapping, my bag swinging – catching his arm and pulling him back and pressing my mouth against his.
He steps away. I step towards him. He holds up his hands, palms out, the universal gesture for stop, and I stand there on the dark street with my arms at my sides and my head bowed, and then I walk away.
The whole thing takes eleven seconds. Eleven seconds that prove everything I told Alex about that night was a lie.
My stomach turns over. I close my eyes, open them again, and the footage is still there, still playing on a loop.
The homeowner promised me he’d wiped it.
I stood in his doorway two days after the dinner and asked him, calmly, politely, whether the camera on the side of his house recorded to a hard drive or to the cloud, and when he said hard drive, I took a copy then offered him two hundred pounds to delete the last week’s footage.
He took the money. He looked me in the eye and said it was done.
And somehow Ross got hold of it anyway – went to the same house, asked the same questions, or maybe the man kept a copy, or maybe there was a second camera I didn’t see.
It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that it exists, that the police and Ross’s solicitor already have it, and that by lunchtime the press will have it, too.
There’s a video file at the bottom of the folder. It’s twenty-three minutes long. The thumbnail shows Ross sitting at a table in what looks like a kitchen. His face is drawn, his eyes are tired, and he’s staring directly at the camera.
I press play.
‘My name is Ross Mercer,’ he says. Quietly.
Steadily. Like he’s thought about every word before saying it.
‘If you’re watching this, something has happened to me.
I don’t know what. I hope nothing has. But I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling like the ground is being pulled out from under me, and I want there to be a record of what actually happened, in my own words, in case I don’t get the chance to say it later. ’
He pauses. Rubs his face with both hands. Takes a breath.
‘I contacted Kim Stiller about six weeks ago. I’d seen her online – her work, her profile, photographs of her family.
And I thought about the way things ended between us, when we were teenagers, and I felt ashamed.
Because I left without saying goodbye. The thing is, I was scared.
Kim scared me. The constant phone calls, following me everywhere, anonymous notes posted through my letter box.
I loved her more than I’ve loved anyone, but it was driving me crazy, and I couldn’t go on like that.
It was my mum who persuaded me to leave town, and I didn’t fight it.
I didn’t contact Kim, and I knew – I always knew – that it would have hurt her.
So I sent her a friend request. I wanted to put things right and apologise.
That was all I wanted. An apology and a conversation, and then we’d both go home to our lives.
Actually, no, that’s not all I wanted. Part of me was curious.
Curious to see if she still had the same effect on me as when we were teenagers.
Intensity, however dysfunctional, can be addictive. You know?’
He stops again. Glances down at the table. When he looks back up, there’s something in his face I recognise from the library – the expression I couldn’t read in the lamplight, the one I thought was menace.
It wasn’t menace. It was grief.
‘We met for dinner. It was good, at first. We talked about the past, about school, about the stupid things we did. And then it changed. She wanted more. Our goodbye turned into a kiss. I wanted it at first, then I didn’t.
I knew it was wrong, knew I couldn’t go back there.
So I said no.’ He swallows. ‘After that, everything went wrong.’
I pause the video. I put the phone face down on the bath mat and press my hands against my knees and breathe. The shower is still running. Steam is filling the room. My face in the mirror is a white smudge behind the condensation, featureless, unrecognisable.
I pick the phone up and press play.
Ross talks for another eighteen minutes.
He talks about the messages that started arriving from anonymous accounts – sexual, threatening, explicit.
He talks about the photograph that was sent to his work email with a note claiming he’d shared intimate images.
He talks about my messages becoming stranger, more insistent, laced with references to things only I could know, and about the dawning realisation that the threats and the tenderness were coming from the same person.
He talks about why he went to the cottage.
‘I drove to Wales because I was desperate,’ he says.
‘I know how that sounds. But she’d spent weeks building a version of me that doesn’t exist – a stalker, an obsessive, a danger to her family – and I could see it working.
Her husband believed it. Her friends will believe it.
The police will believe it if she goes to them, and then my life is over.
A woman’s word against a man’s, and I’ve got no proof except screenshots she can say I faked.
’ He presses his palms flat on the table.
‘So I went to the cottage. I tried the doors. I know how that looks, and I’m not proud of it.
I was desperate and frightened, and I wasn’t thinking straight.
But when they wouldn’t open, I posted a note through the letter box asking her to talk to me – one conversation, face to face.
Yes, I’ve brought her daughter into it, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.
But I honestly could not see any other way.
I posted the note, and I drove away. I didn’t throw anything. I didn’t break any windows.’
He leans forward. Closer to the camera. His eyes are bright, and his voice is raw.
‘I know what I’m about to do is wrong,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take her daughter to the school. Not to hurt her – I’d never hurt a child. But I need Kim to come to me in a place she can’t rewrite, and the school is the only place that means something to both of us.