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

there was something Lizzie wasn’t telling her. She felt ashamed for not trying harder; she had been so wrapped up in her own busy life that she hadn’t even noticed her friend walking wounded beside her.

Anna was outraged on Lizzie’s behalf, but something in Ben’s demeanor stopped her from speaking out—there was more. He was managing the story just as he’d managed Lizzie by the car. Even though the bride had hardly been in the same room as him since they’d all arrived at the château, there was a bond between the two of them. Anna looked across to Effie, who was—as ever—hanging on Ben’s every word, and she felt a stab of worry for this friend too. For how she now suspected Effie’s hopes with Ben might end.

“Dan read your phone, didn’t he, Lizzie?” Ben said. “He had the password to your emails?”

“That was just once,” Lizzie said bleakly. “Because he was worried—”

“So worried he began to insist on collecting you from work every night too,” Ben added, finishing the sentence, and it was Effie’s turn to moan. Poor, poor Lizzie—trapped in her life, trapped in plain sight, and the rest of them cheering her on to get married to the man who had boxed her in.

“Who bought the dress you wore to the engagement party?” Ben asked Lizzie carefully, and she burst into fresh tears.

“It was a gift! He knew I liked it! He was doing something nice!” she cried.

“He chose every outfit after that, didn’t he?”

Lizzie’s shaking shoulders seemed to nod an affirmative, even as she shook her head miserably.

“Oh, Lizzie!” Anna cried, her own voice rent with emotion, and Ben met her appalled eyes with the saddest expression in his own.

“I just wish I’d known sooner,” he said quietly. “I told her I thought she should cancel the wedding.” He spread his palms at his sides. “What else was there to do? Lizzie didn’t want to go to the police, so I helped her get Dan out of her life. We changed the locks, began boxing up his stuff.”

“Lizbet?” Effie, stirred from her horror, rushed to share the sunbed her friend lay supine on as the events of her life washed over them all. But Lizzie could only sob and splutter, heaving in one breath and then another, her grief assaulting her again and again.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Effie looked up at Ben, her voice cracking as she asked him the inevitable question. The question Anna had been waiting for.

This man Effie had been so close with had understood, for the past week at least, what their friend had been suffering and not told her. Anna wondered why exactly that might be and felt her heart begin to race.

“I hoped that canceling the wedding would be the end of it,” Ben answered, hanging his head and setting his mouth in an apologetic line of self-recrimination—or was it a failed attempt to hide a smirk? “I guess I didn’t want you to think of Dan that way. I’m sorry. I said he could move in with me while he sorts himself out….He doesn’t know my role in helping Lizzie, of course.”

Lizzie sniffed and wiped her streaked face with the palm of one hand. “Yet,” she said emphatically. “Doesn’t know yet.”

Ben cleared his throat purposefully. “It took me too long to find out what Dan was capable of. When I didn’t hear from him for a few days, I thought he was just angry with me, annoyed that I was siding too much with Lizzie. But his phone’s been dead for so long now, I’m wondering whether he’s actually changed his number. And if he has, why?”

He ran a hand through his hair, and it bristled upward where it was damp with sweat.

“We know Dan ordered the wedding to be set up again,” offered Bertie. He was sitting a few yards away in a deck chair, his usual warmth swapped for sadness like a portrait covered in mourning.

“And the messages,” Iso said. “Sneaking in and leaving us those messages—and the one in the book the morning after the wedding! That must have been him too!”

You deserve each other. Anna couldn’t fault Iso’s logic.

“The wedding stuff I thought was an honest mistake,” Ben acknowledged, nodding, “but then Bertie found out from Marie….Then the pad, the mirror. And then, this morning, in the caves—that’s when I knew for sure.”

He paused, clenched a fist, and banged it against his knee as if to flagellate himself. “Dan’s not going to let Lizzie go.”

35. Effie

She watched as Ben pulled one strong hand over his face as if rearranging his features might lift his mood. As if, when he took his hand away, the scene would somehow have changed to one of happiness.

“Oh, mate,” he said sorrowfully to himself. “What have you done?”

“I’m not marrying him,” Lizzie said to Ben tersely from the sunbed. “Shouldn’t this be over now?”

Effie felt she was following the proceedings from under a thick glass dome. Every line Ben spoke seemed distorted: This monster we were talking about was Dan. And his victim was Lizzie. Our Lizzie.

Since James had left, Effie hadn’t watched any of the scary movies her ex-boyfriend had so enjoyed—clicking the light on in the middle of the night to discover that she was still alone matched any dread the supernatural could offer. But she felt like a character from one now. In those films, the least credulous were always the first to go. Even though Effie knew there was no such thing as ghosts, she would find herself urging the on-screen skeptics to wake up to the fact of them so they might escape in time. She felt herself doing something similar now: there is a new Dan to believe in, and you must believe in him before he comes for Lizzie and it’s too late.

But why hadn’t Lizzie told her? Even more bizarrely, Ben—whom Effie had spent the past month languidly enjoying, moving with hungrily,