Perrie Edwards was shocked to receive a message from someone she hadn’t heard from in a long time, her ex-fiance, Zayn Malik.
Speaking on the We Need To Talk podcast with Paul Brunson, the Little Mix star revealed that Zayn, 31, reached out to her roughly three years after their split.
The One Direction sensation and Perrie, 32, dated for approximately four years, from 2011 to 2015, during which they got engaged in 2013.
Zayn’s message created an awkward situation for the Shout Out To My Ex songstress as she was already in a steady relationship with soccer player Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.
"I remember there was one point my ex reached out and I didn’t know how to handle the situation," she said. "I’d been with Alex for like a year and a half, two years. And I felt a bit uncomfortable about it."
Although the Oops singer didn’t reveal what the message said, she described the experience as nerve-racking.
"I remember being terrified thinking, 'Oh no,'" She recalled sweating and panicking, unsure of how to tell her new partner about the unexpected contact. "Then I sat down and was like, 'I need to tell you something.'"
To her relief, Alex, with whom she got engaged in 2022, handled the situation with calm and maturity. "So I told him everything. And then he was like, 'Okay, well I really appreciate you telling me. Thank you for letting me know. That’s fine. Hopefully he doesn’t contact you again.'"
While the text itself remains a mystery, the timing raised eyebrows with fans, who done the math, believed it happened in 2018, around the time Zayn had separated from model Gigi Hadid, with whom he shares a four-year-old daughter, Khai Malik.
Perrie, who now shares a son Axel with Alex, praised her fiancé for being "very mature" and "level-headed," making it much easier to deal with the unexpected DM.