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

just…overdid it.” And she steadied herself with one hand on the tabletop.

“Well, thanks a lot, guys,” Lizzie said, the pitch of her voice high and ragged: a semi-scream that came from the gut. “I came here to try and get away from all this…shit”—she gestured at the tables, the food, the flowers, the incontrovertible fact of a wedding party well and truly thrown—“and you celebrate while I’m fucking asleep.” She wiped a heavy hand across her face. “What time did you even go to bed anyway?”

“You didn’t hear us come up?” Anna asked quietly.

Lizzie shook her head slowly. “Dosed up, remember.”

Bed. Effie tried to remember the fact of having gone to bed, something she knew she must have done because she had woken up in one. But there was no recollection there—only a worried whirring that echoed around her head as her empty mind flicked through its Rolodex of likelihoods.

Charlie.

She felt a settling sensation in her bowels, like snow shifting in a drift. Charlie, standing only a few feet away from her, wore the tragic look of a man who knew he had let himself down. What had he said when she’d walked in on him in the kitchen? “There’s no need to mention—” And then he’d been interrupted.

Charlie, who she’d known for so long, had been with once, long ago, for a clutch of weeks that added up to just a few minutes over the life span of their friendship but that now felt more relevant than they had done in years.

Charlie, with his short, dark hair, just like the ones she’d found on the pillow next to hers. In the honeymoon suite, where the newlyweds would go after they’d been married.

Effie lifted her head where she leaned on the table and retched efficiently into the ruined plate of hors d’oeuvres nearest to her. As she wiped a long strand of bile from her chin, she caught his eye and the look was almost symbiotic. A fellow sufferer…and what else? He darted his pupils away before she could search his face for clues.

Lizzie was still standing at the top of the stairs, a player in the eaves waiting to be lowered into the action on a wire. Now she descended for the exposition. “What on earth did you lot do last night?”

“We had some drinks—” Charlie began.

“A lot of drinks,” interrupted Effie.

“Ben kept pouring shots,” Anna said, and Lizzie’s expression hardened.

“We danced,” murmured Iso.

“Yes! We danced!” Effie agreed, relieved to at least be able to corroborate something.

“We carried on drinking.” Steve’s eyes were big brown pools of contrition, directed toward Anna, his alcohol buddy and hangover soulmate for seven years who knew just how badly affected he could be by both. “What was that cocktail you mixed up, Ben? I felt like I was on drugs.”

Ben’s voice came out like a gargle of stones. “Called a shambles,” he said. “Vodka, champagne, Red Bull.” He shrugged guiltily. “Fun, but lethal.”

“Then what?” asked Effie. Her hands and upper arms were shaking as she tried to re-tie her hair into a ponytail, away from her face, where a slick of anxious sweat was building on her forehead, the bridge of her nose, the nervous zone on her upper lip.

“Then I went to bed, you lot carried on, and whatever happened…happened.” Anna spread her hands, waiting for them to enlighten her. “Lizzie, did you really sleep through the whole thing?”

The question almost sounded accusatory: directed at the one person who couldn’t have had anything to do with their antics.

“I was out cold.” She cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders in quizzical mode. “Should I be jealous? Clearly, I didn’t have half as much fun at my own wedding as you lot did.”

Lizzie took a few more steps into the rubble of the night before. “You know, part of me thought you might have tidied some of this away so I didn’t have to see it all again this morning. Demolishing it instead was certainly one approach.”

The set of her face was frosty and thoroughly unimpressed.

Though Effie winced at the acerbic tone, Anna held Lizzie’s stare for a moment, opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She tapped the fingers of one hand along her jawbone, then tried again. “Well, I think we need to contact whoever set all this up and tell them to come and collect it. Do you have their numbers?”

“I told you: we already canceled it all. Me, Dan, Effie, Ben. We called them all.” Lizzie’s tone was frustrated, bordering on disgust.

Anna softened and began walking toward her friend, still ignoring her husband, where he stood in the doorway to her right.

“I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I know this must be…very weird. And upsetting. All our fault—we messed up. But is there somebody we can get in touch with to sort out the…?” She gestured around the room. “All this?”

“I’ll try Marie?” Ben spoke up, querulously, from the opposite side of the Hall. Marie was the woman Lizzie and Dan had paid to knit all the strands of their day together on the ground from her office in a nearby town. “Think I got some reception over there yesterday.”

He pulled his phone from his pocket and strode farther off across the terrace, toward where the landscape lay on the horizon.

“Should we call Dan?” Effie asked quietly.

Marie had been Dan’s find, Dan’s contact. Dan’s responsibility on the list of things to be undone. He had been the one to call her, to explain that they wouldn’t need the long list of things she had been working through for them. Lizzie hadn’t been able to face it. Now she set her jaw against the specter of the man she had once wanted to grow old beside: too painful to have on this holiday, in this room, in her head.

Ben returned from the end of the terrace, shaking his head. “No answer,” he called. “Barely any reception, but just enough to get her voicemail.”

“Look,” Anna said gently to Lizzie.