AJ Carter - Author Facebook ad: “She told herself it was just closure. It wasn't.”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

2161759831396410

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram and Threads

Relaunches

1

Niche

Parenting & Kids

How we count

Ad text

I don’t know why I still use it. Nobody my age admits to using it any more – everyone’s on Instagram or TikTok or whatever Olivia’s generation has migrated to this week – but I’ve had my account since university, and it’s like an old coat I can’t throw away. I scroll past a school mum selling baby clothes, a recipe video for something involving feta and pasta that I’ll save and never make, and a post from a woman I went to college with who has just run a half marathon and wants everyone to know about it. My thumb stops. There’s a notification on the screen. A small red circle, tucked in the corner. You have a new friend request. I tap on it without reading the rest. It’s probably someone from the school, or one of those blank-profile strangers who add everyone and turn out to be selling something. The name loads. My stomach drops. I stare at the screen. The kitchen tap is dripping somewhere behind me, a faint rhythmic plink I hadn’t noticed until now. The house feels too big and too quiet, and my tea has gone cold again in my hand. Ross Mercer. I read it again. Ross Mercer. The profile picture is small, a man in a dark coat, face half turned away from the camera, but I know. I know the way I’d know my own handwriting. My hands are shaking. I haven’t read that name in years. Haven’t said it out loud in longer than that. And here it is, sitting on my phone screen at half eight on a Monday morning in my cluttered little office with the candle-scented curtains and the view of next door’s garage, as if it’s nothing. As if he’s just someone from the past who fancies reconnecting. But Ross Mercer doesn’t reconnect. Ross Mercer disappeared. One day he was there – in the corridor, in the library, pressed close in the dark with his mouth on mine – and the next he was gone. No note. No explanation. No goodbye. Just an empty desk, a phone that stopped ringing, and a seventeen-year-old girl who spent the next six months waiting for someone who was never coming back. I put my phone down, screen up, and grip the table until my fingers go white. He’s found me. After all this time, Ross Mercer has found me. I pick up the phone again. I should close the app. I should put it away, open the design files, get on with my day, and treat this like what it probably is – a random click, a bored afternoon, a man clearing out old names and adding anyone he half remembers. People do that. It doesn’t have to mean anything. But my thumb is hovering over his name, my pulse is loud in my ears, the kitchen tap keeps dripping, and the house is so quiet I can hear my own breathing. I tell myself it’s nothing. I don’t believe a word of it.

Where the ad sends people

amazon.co.uk/kindleunlimited

She told herself it was just closure. It wasn't.

If you tore through The Girl on the Train for a narrator you couldn't quite trust, you'll recognise the feeling here. Readers who loved the slow suffocation of Behind Closed Doors — an ordinary marriage with something wrong inside it — will know this house. And if The Woman in the Window worked ...