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

it wasn’t even about the wedding. The fact that this hadn’t ended when the relationship did was proof that there was a bigger axe to grind. A debt to settle beyond the bargain I thought I’d agreed to.

I’d ended things so that everyone involved might move on, but clearly he wasn’t planning to. In some twisted way, he still wanted the wedding to go ahead, so that he could play his final, terrible card.

It was the sounds of the first dance that woke me, even though I’d taken enough of my pills to knock out the whole party. At first, I wasn’t surprised—we’d listened to that song, me and Dan, so many times in the past six months that I practically heard it in my sleep anyway. We had been trying to perfect our moves for the evening of our big day: he focused obsessively on his footwork, and I practiced keeping a smile on my face while, inside, my pulse raced in anxiety rather than excitement.

Those horns, that Motown beat, the high hat. “Happiness condensed to three minutes, joy transliterated on a stave.” Steve wrote that about the song in an article of his I’d found on Google. The soaring strings wormed their way into the blank space where my dreams should have been and crowbarred me back into reality. The place I least wanted to be, the place where the photographs existed.

Then I realized groggily: they were celebrating my wedding. My friends, enjoying my wedding without me. I almost threw the tooth mug of water I had filled and put by my bed at the chimney breast opposite, but I didn’t want them to know I was awake.

I lay up there in the dark, disinvited from my own party, simmering with silent and heartbroken resentment as they tucked into the wine I had chosen, the food I had tasted, ummed and aahed over, paid for. I had felt abused for so long now, I hadn’t thought it possible to hurt more than I already did—but there is nothing more painful than an injury inflicted by your closest friends. In their cups, their rowdy partying, they had forgotten all about me—even Effie, after everything we’d gone through. That’s what really stung as I lay upstairs listening to them like some madwoman in the attic.

Vengeful Medea on the roof, more like. I wanted nothing more than to set light to the bonfire I’d built underneath us all—I’d already saved Effie from the flames once, though she didn’t know it, and she’d paid me back by bringing the spark to the tinderbox.

If we’d just got married quietly at home—been clapped through the lych-gate of St. Swithun’s and trundled back to Mum and Dad’s garden for cucumber sandwiches—none of this would have happened.

None of the setup, I mean. None of the drama. The mistake had been made—I could never go back and undo that. But what I hadn’t realized was that I’d also provided the stage for it to be unveiled to my friends like a comedy of fucking errors. Scene one, Bangkok. Scene two, a hotel room. Scene three, a bar. Scene four: France, a big house, a big wedding. The bigger the day got, the more there was to spoil. The more collateral damage.

I had canceled every last vol-au-vent and champagne flute, as soon as I sent the email. He must have rebooked everything to torment me when he realized I was still planning to come.

It was beautiful, all of it. Everything I’d asked for, right down to the shade of the ribbons around the flowers to match the ones I’d planned to wear in my hair. Hair I had instead taken to pulling out in desperate fistfuls as the intimidation, the threats reached their peak.

Hearing my wedding taking place downstairs without me as Charlie popped cork after cork and Effie and Iso whooped was devastating, but what I feared most was a knock on the door behind which I was cowering.

When the music died down and I heard the tread of feet to bedrooms along the tiles outside my room, I waited until everything in the house was still and then I got up. I didn’t know what I’d find, but I understood that the silence was the signal. My summons.

Now that the rest of them had passed out, there was a chance to resolve things. As if I hadn’t tried that several times already.

I walked through the debris of my wedding like a ghost bride moving backward through time. I’d give anything to go back and undo it all, rebalance my life, take control of it again—for Effie’s sake, too. I was overwhelmed by a wave of melancholy. This was really happening to me. This had been my chance at happiness. Now it was gone.

Since the engagement party, I’d been observing it all from a distance, as though I were floating high in the air as the circus tent collapsed beneath me. Disassociation—it’s an anxiety thing. Perhaps helped along by all the Valium I’d been taking and the wine I’d been drinking to keep everything at bay.

And so I sat, despairing and disheveled in my long white cotton nightgown—excessively bridal and bought for this very night—at the head of the table I had expected to preside over in ivory silk.

A noise, and my head flew up like a deer’s in the road, looking first toward the door, then to the stairs. The Oratoire creaked almost constantly with the weight of the centuries it had witnessed, but this had come from outside—beyond the double doors, left open when the others had retired in their varying states of incapacity.

The disarrayed furniture out there looked as drunk as my friends had sounded.

It was only a small rasp—quieter than a cough—but it caught my attention in the otherwise still and silent room.

Then he was there, standing in the doorway, and still—despite everything, despite what he had done and the things he had said—I felt the echo of that thrill in my chest,