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

claiming ecstasy—had not thought to mention the sad story he had just shared. She felt somehow embarrassed at having been left out, faintly—pathetically—jealous of the secret bond that had developed between him and her best friend.

“So Dan has been here since the wedding night?” Effie asked slowly.

“I think there’s every chance he has been,” Bertie replied.

As she staggered to the kitchen to get…something that might take the edge off the revelations, Effie felt sick, but vindicated.

She had long had the smallest shred of niggle in her mind—after a throwaway comment Ben had made at his best friend’s engagement party all those months ago. It had seeded and bloomed in that time, as they’d watched Lizzie grow pale and stop communicating with those closest to her—and it had now been proved correct.

The comment had been muttered in a silky undertone onto her earlobe, one eyebrow cocked for the punch line, as Effie hooted along in merriment to a twisting story of teenage misdemeanors and boarding school ribbing—as James stood back, looking grumpy—of how the two men had become such firm friends.

“Then again,” Ben had laughed beerily, “Dan’s always been the possessive one.”

Gazing at the happy couple across the dance floor, where they were attempting a shimmy to some obscure seventies disco track—despite Anna’s plea to Steve to play only things people knew the words to—Effie had shivered off the words that gave a different color to the hand on Lizzie’s waist, the palm cupping her ecstatic face. As the sequins of light from the glitterball faded from blue to pink, so Effie chose to see what she wanted to, not what Ben had implied.

Now that she knew the whole of it, Effie was devastated not only for Lizzie but by her own failure to examine the pulsing of instinct in her own heart. A cup of tea and a snuggly quilt wouldn’t cut it in eighty-five-degree heat, so she reached instead for yet another cool green bottle from one of the scullery’s bottomless fridges and arranged enough glasses on a tray for the whole group to swig from as they sat around Lizzie in watchful pity until a time when she wanted to speak to them of it.

A campaign, Ben had said. A campaign. Effie thought first of all of the very billboards and TV spots that Lizzie herself dealt in at work: the strategically planned, guided, and gradual doling out of selective information until such a point when those lapping it up were indisputably hooked, loyal, willing consumers. But as Ben talked, her mind had turned to the military sort—to the pushes, the clashes, the falling backs, and the sieges. The wearing down of defenses and cutting off of resources until the stronger party could set a flag in this newly won territory, declaring that it now belonged, wholly and entirely, to them. It had been that sort of campaign.

She reappeared on the terrace with the tray of glasses and a chrome cooler but missed a step as she began descending to the poolside—as her foot landed awkwardly, one of the stems wobbled and fell, then smashed on the pale flagstones.

“Mind your bare feet!” she called out as Bertie and Charlie flew to recover the bigger shards and Steve scanned for the tinier, more insistent pieces, which could lie in wait and pierce unexpectedly, long after the accident had been forgotten.

“Are you okay?” Effie asked, lowering the tray onto one of the side tables and sitting on an adjacent sunbed next to her tear-stained friend.

Quieter now, Lizzie sniffed and smiled gratefully when, from her other side, Iso passed a tissue from within her pretty wicker basket bag. Effie put a hand on the nearest part of her friend she could find—despite beginning its freckling of new suntan, Lizzie’s foot felt like a block of ice. She looked at the toes crooked in her palm, their nails painted in the bridal blush of a shade called Sweetness & Light. Though Effie had been there like a good best friend when Lizzie chose it at the nail bar, she had not been a good enough one to know that life behind the facade had been anything but.

“Did he…hurt you?” Anna asked, hardly believing the Dan they knew to be capable of it. Lizzie had joked often that it was she, not he, who stamped a foot, raised a voice. Dan had always seemed so easygoing, so passive. Clearly there had been a strong current under those still waters.

“No, never.” Lizzie shook her head vehemently, still protective of his reputation, like a doting captive.

“Well, that’s something,” said Ben, standing and clearing his throat. “I know it came close a few times—”

“I can’t do this anymore, I need to go and lie down, I’m sorry.” Lizzie got to her feet and swayed a little, pale-faced beneath her tan.

Effie stood and made to support her at the elbow. “Let me come with you, Lizbet.”

But Lizzie insisted: she would go inside alone. She needed space. Time to think about what to do next, but also to sleep. The grief and worry that had clung to her like an illness these past months had made her weak, like an invalid.

“But we still don’t know where Dan is.” Anna’s angst was palpable. “Someone should be with you.”

“I’ll go,” Ben said, smiling at Lizzie reassuringly. Kindly, brotherly. “I feel like this is all my fault. If only I’d known what he was really like, I might have stopped all this.”

Lizzie hung her head in acquiescence. Then to nobody in particular, but to all of them—to Charlie, who was pouring himself a glass of wine, and Steve, still sweeping up the broken glass; to Iso and Effie on the loungers; to Bertie, Anna, and Ben, who were closest to her—and with the weary look of someone who has had to do it before: “I’ll lock my door.”

36. Lizzie

Prickled skin, big eyes, a jumping heartbeat—they have the same effect on your body, love