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

and fear. I tried to defend Dan against what Ben was telling them, but I couldn’t: I was too afraid. My body trembled with it—with fear and with outrage. I didn’t have the new script he seemed to be working from; in my draft, the story ended back in London.

I’d asked him to leave while we were in the caves—the only place I could talk to him bluntly without anybody else overhearing. Despite the sensation of him breathing down my neck every second I was under the same roof as him, in reality we had shared very little air, barely exchanged any words directly, since arriving at the château. In the dark, with all those hellscapes whizzing round us on the walls, I told him I’d done everything he’d asked; now it was his turn to follow the rules of the game he’d set up. If he didn’t, I’d have to reveal the truth to everybody—my final, desperate out.

That was what made him switch to this new tack, this Dan angle. He was incensed that I’d tried to fight back and he wanted to show me who was in charge.

I’d learned over the past months how slippery Ben was, how persuasive, how insistent. Like a tide that starts by filling up your shoe, then chases you up the beach, intent on covering the top of your head, too.

I felt myself drowning now—not only in his lies but in my own fury. Here I was, cooped up in my bedroom, with my jailor pretending to be my guardian, my closest friends steps away but unable to help. It was all I could do not to rip the curtains down from where they festooned the four-poster bed or smash the place up; I was crying still but the tears were now of hot and stupid, frustrated rage rather than sorrow. My whole chest burned with it, and my fingers became fists.

When I’d slammed the door and breathed out properly for what felt like the first time in the past hour, I’d sounded more like a snarling dog than a person. And when I looked at myself in the vast glass that hung on one wall—having briefly contemplated hurling a chair into it to relieve some of the tension—I saw a mask of pure hatred staring back.

I’d had to just sit there as I’d watched it dawn on each person’s face—each beloved face of someone I’d known my entire adult life—that the man they thought I had once been in love with was a monster. The loveliest, kindest man I’d ever met, who accepted me and adored me for all my flaws, twisted beyond all recognition. Dan told me he had always been in awe of Ben at school for his confidence and his cheekiness—his ability to grapple with life where meek teenage Dan had allowed events to wash over him—but Ben’s destructive streak was as vast and infinite as Dan’s capacity for love. Just how much hurt, how much pain, would be enough for him? Was his plan to ruin Dan’s life—Dan’s reputation—as well as mine?

Now that he was changing the rules again, I was scared Ben wouldn’t stop until he had destroyed something even more sacred: my friendship with Effie. What if he persuaded her that he and I had been seeing each other behind her back, the way he’d planned to persuade Dan? Or worse, what if he made her believe that we had enlisted her in some kind of bizarre game to take the heat off us around the time of my wedding? Would she see through it?

I leaned my head back on the door I had just locked against him, shuddering at the fact he was right there on the other side of it.

Was he laughing? Smiling that complacent smirk? I knew then that if the door hadn’t been between us, my inner schoolgirl would have lashed out at him: I wanted to scratch, bite, pull, kick. I wanted him to feel the same frenzy of wounds he had inflicted on me, on my life and my friends.

But I knew the real wound had already been dealt. The blow to his pride when I had chosen Dan. If that first cut really had been the deepest, then the way to deal the final blow would be to fight back. Not with fingernails and slaps, not chaotically but cautiously.

I knew then that I’d do anything not to let him get away with ruining my life, or Dan’s, or Effie’s.

But I still didn’t know the answer to the most crucial question: Would my best friend choose Ben over me?

Four Days After

37. Effie

As Lizzie slept behind a locked door and Ben guarded the stairs, Effie and Bertie sat out on the terrace as the night made dark, hulking lumps of the mountains at the edge of the skyline, and the moon frosted over the plain below like ice. The heat of the day had dissipated but they were warm enough still, caped in blankets lifted from a chest in the Hall.

“They think of everything, our hosts,” Bertie said absentmindedly, as he wrapped himself more tightly. “Every comfort catered to.”

Effie snorted. “Rather overzealous, if you ask me—setting up a wedding that had been canceled and all that…”

“Touché. Except that it had been uncanceled, after all.” Bertie sipped his glass of red wine. “Poor Lizzie. Awful to think of anybody treating her like that.”

He paused, and Effie knew they were both thinking of the same thing in that moment. The pale sprigged curtains of Lizzie’s teenage bedroom, bleached because she had taken to keeping them closed during the day. He had sat with her for days on end when she came home from university for the final time. The aftermath had been so much longer than the incident itself.

“Thank you, by the way,” he said. “For what you did back then. I’ve never had the chance to say it