The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

now obstructed by knocked and fallen chairs that had meant to accommodate another eighty or so guests staying in the town at the bottom of the hill—a bundle of carefully selected and deliberately folksy-looking wildflowers lay on the stone flags. Surrounding it were several dead heads and petals that it had shed on impact, as if hurled.

Lizzie’s bouquet.

Beyond the back row of chairs, Anna had been standing silently on the terrace, eyes closed and chin tilted, bathing her face in the morning sunshine. As voices rose within, her lids snapped open and she strode back toward them, twisting through the melee of chairs and through the open doors. Her capable, toddler-strengthened arms were folded across the white cotton T-shirt she wore with a pair of navy shorts. She looked considerably less haunted than the rest of them, Effie thought, as Anna took in the scene with the detachment of somebody not appraising it for the first time.

“Lizzie, I—,” Effie began confidently enough, then halted, as if suddenly chastened. “I’m so, so sorry.”

From the other end of the terrace, climbing the steps that led from the swimming pool, Ben loped toward the open doors. He wore the same clothes as yesterday and an expression of sore confusion that seemed etched into his face as though onto a statue. His feet were bare, his lips slightly gray.

Effie dragged herself from Charlie’s side in the lee of the kitchen doorway along one wall to approach Lizzie. She walked bowed, with the morning’s weakness but also in penance, regret.

On the opposite side of the room, the altar stood, framed by the doorway, still serene and seemingly undisturbed by the chaos surrounding it. A tide of spilled…something had licked around its wooden base, but it stood otherwise untouched, upright in the morass like the crow’s nest on a sinking ship.

A rustling sound came from one of the open doorways at the other end of the Hall. Steve made his entrance, bare-chested with his lower half wrapped in a purple towel, blinking himself awake and into daylight with what looked like a difficulty similar to that which Effie had experienced upstairs. His eyes tracked guiltily to Anna by the altar, her face pulled into the sort of wordless query only couples can exchange.

She stood behind the podium, stony-faced. In front of her, the teak shelf was empty—the thick-paged guest book now lay at a drunken angle on the long table nearest to where Effie stood, hunched and swaying slightly. The pair of golden rings that had sat in its crease and caught the sun yesterday—was it really only yesterday?—were gone.

Shouldn’t Dan have had the rings ahead of the ceremony?

The thought was so fleeting, given what Effie’s eyes took in next, that she never voiced it, had forgotten it in the time it took her to breathe. On the textured vellum of the wedding book, somebody had entered the first and only message in celebration of the wedding that hadn’t happened. Block capitals, tidy but arresting, in the black ink of the Sharpie left for precisely that purpose, and in the purposeful handwriting of a “Back in five minutes” shop sign, a “Deliveries round the back” note: functional, anonymous. Which made what it said even more strange.

Effie blinked. She rolled her vision over the square letters once more, noting the varying gaps between them, the seasick slant of the lines that gave away the late, lush hour at which they were written. She felt a butterflying nervousness settle into her stomach. It mixed there with the resident nausea into a gluey, anxious curdle.

“ ‘Congratulations,’ ” she croaked. “ ‘You deserve each other.’ ”

As she read the message aloud—more in an attempt to disprove the fruits of her own literacy than to alert anyone else as to the book’s contents—Iso appeared in the doorway behind Steve.

Luminous, tanned, and glamorous in even a state of bedhead—the edge only slightly taken off her sleekness with a telltale smearing of eye makeup just like Effie had woken up with—she was clad in a matching shade of lavender beach towel to Steve’s, wrapped around the middle of her from sternum to upper thigh, and nothing else. As she heard Effie mouth the words into existence, her dull and semi-somnolent expression leaped into fresh urgency. In its wake came the seconds-later reverb of creakiness and pain that Effie and Charlie had experienced in the kitchen.

“Did someone get married last night?” Iso croaked.

The woman’s every move was followed by almost a million people, but Effie could see that the most recent activity, like her own, had failed to upload. The young “influencer” was experiencing a Page Not Found moment, a 404 error message in the depths of her brain. She put one hand to the top of her head, as if that might stop the pulse there beating like a Taiko drummer, scrunched her thick dark hair in a fist, and looked at her other hand, clenching the purple towel to her otherwise naked body, as she noticed Steve similarly wrapped next to her.

“Oh my God.” Iso’s voice was a rusty gear in need of oiling. “Did we get married?”

12. Anna

Iso’s words hung in the Hall like confetti above their—aching—heads, then fell to earth not with the picturesque quality of the floral gauntlet that each new couple runs after their ceremony but with something rather more like the reality of it. On every nuptial showreel, in between the smiling shots harvested for the albums, the silver frames, the profile pictures, are the unfortunate stills where the well-meaning blizzard dive-bombs the bride’s and groom’s eyes and clogs their throats like a cloud of Highland midges.

Across the room, Anna saw Charlie’s face crumple in confusion. At the other end of it, her husband stood rigidly beneath the stone arch of the doorway and trained his unblinking eyes on the woman he had promised never to forsake for anyone else, whose forehead he had cooled with flannels for two days during childbirth, whose