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

message from her parents asking whether she had arrived safely. Effie replied promptly; she knew they worried about how chaotic her life had become, how the stable orderliness she’d once lived by had been undone overnight like a ship overturned in a gale. She just hoped nobody at work had realized that yet. Effie loved her job, adored her girls, but she had not done them justice recently.

As Anna spun the car in a horseshoe, from one side of the road to the other, the phone in Effie’s lap gave a tardy shudder.

James. She had deleted her ex-boyfriend’s details from her phone, but his very facial features were visible to her in the digits she knew by heart anyway.

“Are you around for a chat? Something I need to tell you.”

Effie knew her ex well enough to understand what this meant: the full stop at the end of a sentence that she had long hoped had just temporarily trailed off rather than been fully reconciled. As much as Effie might hope James was getting in touch to say he missed her, it seemed more likely he’d found a new girlfriend and was gearing up to break the news as gently as possible.

Effie couldn’t speak to him there and then, not just because Ben was in the car but because Anna had driven them back into the black spot that surrounded the house for what seemed to be a two-mile radius.

She felt winded and battle-weary, but also in that moment, as the mostly empty people-carrier bounced along the stones and potholes of the dusty and otherwise deserted trail that led up to the château, strangely wired—as though she had drunk several very strong French coffees.

She had something to tell James too, she reflected, not without a rising feeling of triumph: she had a new boyfriend, after all.

16. Eighteen Months Earlier: Lizzie

I was single for eight hours before we met. Just long enough to fly to Bangkok to begin the process of coming home—and growing up. Walking off that beach was like shedding a skin that had never really fit me properly; I was more myself the minute I took it off.

I had never really enjoyed traveling the way Guy did. I preferred my holidays finite, with the prospect of returning to real life at the end of them. I wanted a job and a home, a family. Guy said that was bourgeois, but I was more interested in climbing the career ladder than the rigging. People like Guy can afford to be bohemian, just like men can afford to drift along without making up their minds for significantly longer than women can.

Guy had a filthy laugh and long, dark hair like a pirate, and although the Dark & Stormy was no Jolly Roger exactly, she exerted a pull over him as strong as any mermaid. He could hear her siren call from every mid-ranking London desk job I persuaded him to try in the name of building a future together like a normal couple. But eventually, all the plans we had to save for a deposit, maybe get married, start trying for a baby were lured onto the rocks and smashed to smithereens.

I grew tired of turning up to everything alone with nothing to show for my relationship but a suntan and a new shell necklace. Tired of watching other people’s lives move on, with promotions and rings, mortgages and cashmere baby bonnets, while my own life sometimes fell off the GPS tracker app Guy installed on my phone—to help us feel closer, he said—for days on end.

By the time we approached Langkawi, I’d been on the boat with Guy for a week and he’d been away—this time—for nearly two months. I watched through binoculars as on the sands, straight-backed hotel waiters in ironed shirts and pressed slacks set up yet another table for two in the low evening sun for dinner, drinks, and a proposal by candlelight. The couples dining at those tables would stagger back love-drunk to a room festooned with rose petals, not caring that this was—as Guy scoffed from his seat by the tiller—a standard romance-by-numbers package worth £85 and added to their bill at check-out, but reveling in the tangible prospect of each other, for ever after.

I knew then—although I think I had always known—that the only official certificate that would ever bind me legally to Guy was the skipper qualification I’d studied for last year.

In the end, stepping off the yacht alone and booking a flight home was the most adventurous thing I had ever done. The staff of the paradise resort Guy had dropped me at booked me a taxi to the airport while I cried in the foyer.

I felt brimming with purpose, driven to get on with the rest of my life. I suppose that’s why everything happened so fast when I met the first man who happened to be wearing a suit rather than a pair of board shorts.

I landed in Bangkok in midafternoon and the next London flight left in the morning, so I followed a tide of twenty-year-olds into town and booked myself into a clean-looking hostel, the only person there with a smart wheelie suitcase rather than an unwieldy but characterful rucksack and an armful of Buddha beads. The showers didn’t exactly have doors on them, but it was only a twelve-hour stay.

I decided to go on a date. With myself. A walk around the market, to enjoy being alone rather than fearing it or resenting it.

Women are taught from such a young age that their own company is always the second-best option, that dining alone is embarrassing, to be done furtively and quickly from behind a book or with headphones on. But I now know that women adopt these distractions not to hide the fact of their aloneness but to conceal it from those who enjoy disturbing them. Never other women—always men, who see our privacy as public property.

I took over