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

“We’ll get in the car, drive to the nearest village, and you can call Dan.”

Both Charlie and Steve cringed at the prospect of taking the wheel in their current state. But it was Lizzie who seemed most anxious at the suggestion, and simply shook her head.

“No,” she said quietly but adamantly, the haunted look returning to her pale face, the blood draining beneath the freckles. “I can’t speak to him right now. Please don’t make me.”

Anna narrowed her eyes, but Effie moved in a few paces to stand next to the heartbroken former bride and laid an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, I’ll call him,” she offered.

14. Anna

Anna picked up the keys to her and Steve’s rental car from the terra-cotta bowl painted with gaudy ripe lemons that sat on the sideboard at one end of the cool, dark Hall, then wrested open the front door of the house, which led straight out to the limy track where the cars were parked.

Amid the wreckage of the wedding night, Anna’s thoughts had found a clarity that her heart hadn’t. They needed to track down this Marie person, to tidy up and to find whoever’s job it was to clear and take away the bacchanalian mess, and then to sit down and thrash out among themselves what had actually taken place.

For that thrashing to happen, she would need to speak to Steve, and she found she had absolutely no wish to do so right now. Her heart, her blood, their history told her he had done nothing wrong, that he never would—and yet, he had still ended up naked with the most attractive woman either of them had encountered since their relationship had begun, seven years ago. On this, the holiday she had so hoped would bring them back together.

Out in the midmorning sunshine, Effie’s pale, sweat-beaded face reminded Anna of the night Sonny had come into the world. She had clung to Steve then as though he could stop her from passing out with the pain of it, the sensation of a drawbridge deep inside her being slowly winched open. Anna, whose medical notes declared that she had had a “normal” labor—an “easy” birth, as the doctor who had stitched her back up afterward told them (easy for whom, exactly?)—had looked into Steve’s face with every turn of the handle within, every notch of agony, and thanked a God she didn’t believe in that if she was going to die, she would do so gazing at someone she loved so much.

Hot tears formed behind Anna’s eyes, and she breathed them away again. The very fact that Steve had upset her so much also cheered her.

I still have feelings for him, after all.

So Anna channeled her nervous energy—the adrenaline that was making her hands shake and her mouth dry despite constantly swallowing—into simply leaving the house and reaching the car.

Yesterday it had been a charabanc delivering them all up for a frothy excursion like exuberant day-trippers; now Anna felt she was leading Effie to it as a policeman might a criminal to the squad car. Pale and thin, Effie looked like she might need to vomit (again) before she climbed in. Anna benchmarked her suffering against her friend’s: slight headache, potentially broken marriage, but thankfully not the sort of hangover that leaves you foaming at the mouth with every step taken.

Small mercies.

She was so focused on Effie’s quaking progress toward the passenger seat that she might easily have missed him, but Effie’s neck jerked so quickly at the movement she had to steady herself with one hand on the car’s roof.

Ben jogged out from the Hall in their wake. “Let me come with you,” he panted, the exertion having propelled some of last night’s alcohol out onto his skin in boozy droplets that Anna could almost smell from where she stood. “If we’re calling Dan, perhaps it’s best I deal with him.”

Fair enough, Anna thought as she unlocked the car.

She had expected to enjoy the stubborn refusal of their phones to register any more than half a bar of reception. The château’s lack of Wi-Fi was so pronounced it had to have been deliberate, she supposed, to foster intense rest and relaxation among the Oratoire’s many guests. But she felt increasingly nervous of it—she was keen to check in on Sonny at home. The house’s remoteness would have been lovely had any of them felt like they were on holiday; instead, it seemed as though they were all on trial for something none of them had any memory of doing.

15. Effie

Dan’s phone was dead.

Ben listened to the high-pitched pips at the end of the line for just as long as it took Effie to realize that she no longer had the strength to hold herself upright. As he let the phone drop from his ear, she slumped forward in the passenger seat of the car.

“No answer,” she panted to Anna. “Let’s go back. I’ve got to drink some water.”

“Yeah, I need to put more clothes on,” said Ben, still shivering in shorts and a T-shirt in the backseat despite the brightening sunshine. “Frozen to the bone.”

Anna eyeballed him in the driver’s mirror.

They had driven as far as they needed to in order for his phone to grasp enough network coverage and put the call through from golden Provence to dreary London. Next to a vineyard laid out so neatly it looked like an even-handed embroidery sampler, Anna turned the car around in a lay-by and drove them back to the Oratoire.

Effie was not in such dire straits that she had forgotten to wonder whether her phone would suddenly burst into life with backed-up texts from James once it had found reception. The mania had lessened since she’d started seeing Ben, but she still spent too many days willing the screen to light up with his name out of habit.

It remained stubbornly silent but for a