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

Lizzie seemed delighted to have met Dan so soon after it had all finished with her ex: one final, exasperated row under the stars and then she’d arrived back at Heathrow, burnished as a terra-cotta goddess and lighting up the arrivals hall like a neon sign. Anna wondered yet again what it was that had changed her friend’s mind, what had brought them all here in such altered circumstances.

What exactly had happened last night, and what it was she had seen.

Looking down at Lizzie again, Anna wondered also whether something of the woman she knew was resurfacing. Anna had never seen Lizzie angry the way she had been that morning—nor did she want to see her that upset ever again. But Christ, it was an improvement on Lizzie’s barely there–ness of the past few months.

Canceling the wedding must have been the right decision after all.

Her gaze lingering, Anna realized that Lizzie wasn’t turning the pages, that behind her sunglasses she was scanning not the words in front of her but the view beyond. She had positioned herself at that end of the pool in order that she might see all of the action in the water. At the top of her arms, shiny with sun cream, the sinews were tensed and taut; her glistening haunches were ready to take flight.

Who was she looking at like that?

From the window, Anna couldn’t make out where the beam of Lizzie’s gaze landed, but she had a good idea. She shook her head, silly with suspicion. Lizzie was heartbroken, traumatized: that was why she was tense.

What am I even doing up here?

Lurking, and looking. Spying on her friends like some lonely, dirty thing. Staring at them all as if searching for clues, for the secrets they didn’t even know they were hiding.

And the ones they did.

21. Eighteen Months Ago: Lizzie

I answered his messages on the dating app (probably far too quickly if we were playing by London rules, but we weren’t), threw some coins onto the bar for my beers, and marched back to my hostel, where I attempted to create a dinner-date look from the beach clothes in my case.

Since Guy and I rarely ate anywhere more formal than a crab shack on those yacht trips, the best I could manage was a black camisole and some sort of artistry with a sarong for a skirt. I had to hope the staff at the hotel wouldn’t pass comment on my Birkenstocks, and I thought again of the waiters I’d watched through Guy’s binoculars, aligning napkins and tealights just so to manifest romance.

I felt like a student again, quixotic about what might happen in a time zone I didn’t belong in, an existence that didn’t feel like mine. I had felt the same life-out-of-life sensation at university when I had met someone who had promised to be an escape route from studying and the library rota but had soon turned out to be a reality check of a rather different sort.

Blood on water. I shook my head clear of the memory: not right now.

I could hardly breathe as I walked into the foyer, a little late, rather frazzled from the Bangkok city heat and following pavementless roads with no names but clusters of wires like washing lines hanging from every telegraph pole. The hard pebble of sadness that had lodged in my chest that morning transformed into excitement; my palms were sweating and my mouth dry, but I felt almost giddy.

Until I realized that the tastefully lit reception area was empty.

I swung my head left and then right, and the stone in my lungs was threatening to shatter with disappointment when a concierge in a striped waistcoat and white shirt gestured to the lift with a smile: “He’s waiting for you on the top floor, madam.”

It took a few dragging seconds to call the lift—I could feel my pulse beating behind my eyes—and as I waited for it to arrive, my back turned on the front desk staff, I was overcome with sweaty mortification that they had taken me for a call girl. My mother would almost certainly have agreed with them. Then, as I stepped into the mirrored box, I saw it illuminated on the interior panel: bar and restaurant, floor 61. The lift moved so quickly I felt like I’d left my stomach behind on the ascent.

I was amazed at the calm up there—no wind, barely even a breeze, and none of the car horns or scooter revs from the street. Lights on the tables twinkled like stars in the firmament, and the low murmur of voices rose like prayers.

As I stepped from the lift, all that separated me from the edge was a transparent wall of glass, and as I climbed a short flight of steps to the bar, the view to my left was of the city spread out in miniature below me, as if seen from the window of an airplane. It was like walking out into the heavens, but for the distant chinging of low-level, reassuringly bland house music from the bar.

I felt even more light-headed at the height and the proximity of the drop. Falling had never seemed so easy.

“Lizzie?” There he was at the top of the stairs, suited and slightly sweaty himself, collar open and eyes glittering at me. A blush of red that wasn’t sunburn surfaced on his cheeks, along with a nervous half-smile as though we were doing something naughty.

I had to keep reminding myself that we weren’t.

And that my plane left for London in ten—no, nine—hours.

From the start, there was no awkwardness. We fell into conversation the way people fall in love: swiftly and incidentally, zapping between topics like synapses flashing in the brain. The books we’d read, the films we’d seen. TV shows we both loved. His traveling days and mine—soon over—and our eagerness to repatriate, take our feet off the gas, the search for