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

care they used to take with each other had dulled. The pleasure they found in each other had settled into cozy jollity rather than a sharp urge. Anna had expected the wonder to abate, but not the need. She slept in a T-shirt that had come free with their house insurance in order to guard against her husband’s interest, but she’d found that his eyes, his lips, his hands no longer even bothered to frame the question.

Celia.

Anna subconsciously gripped the spare tire of fat around her middle, tweaked the fleshy drape under her chin. She still got a surprise every time she saw herself in photographs—bigger and looser now, recognizably her but wider, as though she’d been steamrollered. No, Steve, it isn’t a problem with the lens.

“What are your best tips for having a family in this profession?” she’d asked one of the older women at the firm when she and Steve had started thinking about babies.

“Get to your target weight before you get pregnant,” the brittle blonde, immaculate and trim in corporate suiting, had answered. “Or you’ll never reach it again.”

Now, at work, she was surrounded by sinewy women in their forties whose bodies belied having ever reached puberty but had produced two or more children; Anna—early thirties, mother of one—looked like she’d had five.

She told Steve a simplified version of this in the library that afternoon, much of which he struggled to hear through her strangle of indignation, snot, and tears.

“Is there anything going on between you and Celia?” she asked, aiming for calm but barking the words out regardless.

“Celia!” Steve looked baffled, and Anna’s blood pressure slowed again. “Christ, no. She’s nice enough, sure, and I do really feel for her sometimes, but she’s…well, she’s pretty annoying, really. Always texting and stuff, always needs a favor.”

Anna began to laugh. “She is really annoying!” Then she began to cry. “She’s always texting you!”

Not Celia.

“Never,” Steve solemnly told her. “I could never.”

As they spoke, Anna began to enjoy the feelings her words seemed to drag out of her. In the early days with Steve, Anna had felt her emotions like a dusting of glitter on her skin—easily swirled, disturbed, aroused with the slightest touch, the most gentle breeze. The longer the two of them had been together, the deeper the love and intimacy had sunk in—like moisturizer or wood oil, to keep things supple. Despite those feelings having long since reached Anna’s core and become a part of her, stirring them up again seemed difficult. No: impossible.

But as they talked in the library, Steve in soft, calming tones and she still with the irregular breathlessness of upset, the ripple effects of the wedding night could finally be felt—in anger, disappointment, and sadness, but also in tenderness and mutual need. Anna felt the wasting away and near destruction of their relationship like a horror, and her skin burned in a way it hadn’t since her son had been born. Steve’s remorse was even more urgent.

They rejoined the others at the poolside, slaked. Never had Anna felt so strongly for her husband.

She just wished she could forget about everything else.

Furry bees droned on mechanically between the bobbly purple heads of lavender now swaying in a light evening breeze. The sun was a smashed egg yolk on the horizon. Up on the terrace, Anna heard the clink of cutlery and food being brought out to the table for dinner. She closed her eyes and sniffed to savor an act of domesticity that she hadn’t been required for. Perhaps she was discovering herself anew after all.

When Anna opened her eyes, the landscape looked darker. Night was closing in—not hurriedly and impatiently as it did in London, as though evening had somewhere else to be, but languidly and louchely, an arm draped across a shoulder tentatively, a hand reached for instinctively.

Tell them the truth.

Anna’s deep out-breath landed in her stomach like a fistful of guilt.

She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the day when Steve had—with nervous, clammy hands—pushed it onto his new wife’s finger and grinned down at her.

She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the day—a week before Sonny’s birth—when she’d had to take it off because her pregnant hands resembled a chain of uncooked sausages. It had been six weeks before it fit again afterward—the same amount of time before she could walk without pain, and she had wondered whether there was a link. Whether as soon as they could move again, mothers needed to be identity tagged, like sheep and cattle, in case they were tempted to wander off in search of greener pastures.

She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the night earlier that week when she had removed it and placed it in a Nile-green color-washed pine drawer next to the bed she had ended up sleeping in alone.

Where it still was.

Anna’s wedding ring had the word “STEVO” engraved inside it like a secret she kept nestled against the cosseted skin underneath it.

The one on her finger had two.

“YOU’RE MINE.”

Three Days After

29. Effie

“Somebody slept well!”

It was a statement rather than a question, lobbed by Charlie across the table to Lizzie, who’d appeared among them that morning, bright and smiling, dressed in a white broderie smock to show off the intensifying brownness of her skin underneath.

“I did!” She beamed and helped herself to a croissant from the baker’s paper bag, this time fetched from the village by Charlie.

“I think we need to start treating this more like a holiday,” she continued, spooning apricot jam onto her plate and reaching for the cafetière, which had already powered the rest of them into conversational mode. “And less like a murder mystery.”

Across their end of the table—the farthest from Lizzie’s—Effie and Anna briefly met each other’s eyes.

“I’d like to go on one of the day trips we had planned for after the…as part of the guest itinerary,” Lizzie explained through a buttery mouthful. “There’s a set