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

the hardness behind my solar plexus again. I had been infatuated with him, and those feelings had been so strong. But time and terror had snuffed them out like the long-gone flames in the sconces on the château walls.

“Finally,” he said, stepping through the doors and reaching for a switch on the decks. He put the music back on, softly this time, not loud enough to wake anybody but enough for me to hear those horns, that Motown beat, the high hat. “I’ve got you to myself.”

Every word of those cancellation emails had felt like a knife to the heart, every keystroke a punch in the face. The first to all of our guests, the next to our nearest and dearest who we had planned to have stay with us at the château. Dan didn’t even know I was sending either of them until I’d done it; I couldn’t face his attempts to persuade me not to. I’ll never be able to forget his expression once he’d seen them.

I knew when I arrived at the château—saw the tables, the napkins, the candles, the bouquet—that I would never be free of him. He had a psychopath’s taste for precision—either that or a bride’s.

“Did you think you could win,” he sneered, “after you humiliated me like that? Do you know how it feels to be dumped for your best mate? Because Effie soon will.”

It was Ben.

The man I spent a night with in Bangkok before I came home and met Dan on a dating app.

33. Effie

“This can’t be happening, let me out!”

As Ben climbed into the car and clunked the door shut behind him, Lizzie, previously desperate to leave the caves—and Dan—behind, began to thrash against her seatbelt, trying to undo it.

Next to her, Effie tried to soothe the bride. “Lizbet, calm down. Let’s just get back and figure out what to do when we get there.”

“You don’t get it—ugh!” Lizzie railed, still scrabbling for the door handle, bucking against the embrace. “None of you get it! He’s a fucking lunatic!”

“That’s why we need to go back, Lizzie,” Anna said gently from the front seat. “It’ll be easier to sort out at the house.”

The passion seemed to leave her as quickly as it had taken over, and Lizzie quieted. From the driver’s seat, Ben contemplated the bride in the mirror: she had one hand over her face, eyes covered as she regained her composure.

“Are we ready now?” he asked, key in the ignition and almost impatient, like a parent dealing with a tantrum. But when he caught Effie’s eye in the reflection, they exchanged a sad, wearied smile.

Ben eased the car back out onto the road, following the route that wound toward the Oratoire.

It was intoxicating, Effie thought, the way he so smoothly took over. As though someone had charged Ben with the welfare of them all. Perhaps that was what a certain type of schooling provides you with, she reflected: the ability to stay cool under pressure.

Barring a couple of student PE teachers and an ancient maths tutor, Effie’s colleagues were mainly women; she had limited experience with meeting men beyond her friendship group and James’s. Beyond the depressing handful of dates she’d recently gone on.

Tall and rangy, with a swimmer’s triangular torso and a well-defined Head Boy chin, Ben was nothing like any of the men Effie’s apps had coyly suggested to her. Nor was he like the ones she had met from James’s office. There, masculinity was skinny and frugal, protected via a shibboleth of obscure websites and cool-related humor that was neither interesting nor funny. Where their manliness had been distributed sparingly, as though it were rationed, Ben so overflowed with it that he made even Charlie look a little smaller by comparison.

That was what had attracted her in the first place, back when he hadn’t seemed to show any particular interest in her. Then, his quiet solidity and calm had seemed like arrogance; now, despite being shaken by the prospect of what Dan was there to do, he was no less solid, no less calm, but had moved into a staccato safety-first mode, and Effie found his natural authority reassuring.

Charlie and Iso raced ahead in their sports car, and Ben drove the others quickly but precisely in near silence. Silence but for the former bride, now crumpled and crying softly in the backseat.

Perhaps she wanted to tell them what exactly it was that she seemed so terrified of, reasoned Effie, who rode alongside her friend and proffered a tissue—accepted and subsequently soaked with tears into a soggy pulp.

Perhaps Lizzie had wanted to explain why the prospect of Dan had struck such fear into her, to get it all off her chest—finally—so they might help her. Perhaps she was desperate to share it—only the racking sobs that emanated not so much from her chest as from her gut would barely let her draw breath, let alone get the words out.

As Ben drove, Lizzie curled away, blond head pressed up against the window, the knuckles of her fists clenched white against the tanned skin on her legs.

Now, after they pulled up to the Oratoire’s entrance, she drew back as Ben climbed out of the front and ran round to open the door for her. Pushing herself upright, Effie did the same.

“Lizzie, I’m so sorry.” He spoke softly but sternly, and leaned into the car where she sat, still belted into her seat, as though he were a roller-coaster operative checking a safety harness before sending her off on the ride of her life. “I didn’t mean to give you such a shock.”

Lizzie’s breathing was still ragged. Effie felt both the warmth of Ben’s care as he offered it and the stillness that had descended on Lizzie, trembling exchanged for an absolute rigid tension. Their friend was like a wild animal cornered, gaze unblinking where she met Ben’s, breath shallow as she seemed to gauge whether he was friend or foe.

Poor Lizzie,