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

opened was the empty blue wooden bed frame that stood parallel to the one she was in, the bed now divested of its mattress and the dust on its slats exposed to the air.

Had it really only been three days since we all arrived to find that wedding scene laid out?

Effie shuddered at the thought of the message in the guest book. Congratulations—you deserve each other.

After Iso’s assumption, the others had agreed that this note had been the first of Dan’s threatening messages but, for Effie, something jarred with that interpretation. Who was Dan talking about, for one thing? And for another, the writing had been different—less full of vitriol, less menacing. More benign somehow, even if the meaning could be skewed unpleasantly. Why would Dan have written that?

Effie didn’t think it had been a message for the original happy couple; she was convinced that it was, instead, intended for a new pairing, a match born, awkwardly and unwisely, in a champagne haze.

The letters had been plaintive in their simplicity, hurt almost. That was why Effie still wondered—with an intense feeling of guilt toward Ben—whether they had been written by someone who might have seen her and Charlie together. Before they had retired upstairs to the honeymoon suite. Effie grimaced; would the whole day be this bad? She hadn’t even sat up yet.

The noise came again—a soft tapping at the door, her door.

“Come in,” she gargled through her last mouthful of sleep.

Anna squeezed herself into the room, curling her body around the door’s wooden plane so as not to open it too far and risk it scraping against the tiles again, waking the others. “Morning.” She smiled, sitting down on the edge of the bed and smoothing out over her legs the light patchwork-print skirt she had on.

Effie stretched her arms over her head and thumped them down onto the bed on either side of where her narrow body lay beneath the thin sheet. She pushed herself upward and shifted the pillows behind to support her back.

“What’s the latest?” she asked Anna, rubbing her eyes. “How’s Lizzie?”

When Anna failed to answer immediately, Effie jerked to another level of awake, stirring her legs to get up. “What? What is it?”

“Shhhh,” her friend said quietly, stopping her where she had moved with a soft but firm palm against her chest. “She’s fine. Nothing has happened. I just—I need to tell you something.”

Effie raised her eyebrows.

“I saw them together—Lizzie and Ben—on the wedding night,” she said apologetically. “I think there might be more going on than they’ve told us.”

“More how?” Effie said, her gorge rising.

Anna sighed, quietly devastated for her friend and for herself, for having to be the person to deliver the bad news. “I think…I think with everything Ben helped her through last week, they might have fallen for each other.”

38. The Wedding Night: Anna

The ungainliness and discomfort of having fallen asleep fully clothed, with the lights on and her mouth open, was something Anna hadn’t experienced since university. Moving in with Effie, Charlie, and Lizzie again, even if only temporarily, was all it had taken to fall back into old habits.

The ability to drink rapaciously, and capaciously, had returned, along with a headache that threatened to fork like lightning from her left temple right down the side of her neck and into a fully fledged migraine if she didn’t take something for it soon.

She pushed two pills out of a blister pack and picked up a glass to wash them down with. Motherhood 101: Drink water as though you have just returned from a forty-day sojourn in the desert whenever even a drop of alcohol passes your lips.

Anna had followed her own good advice to the letter before she’d passed out and had gulped several refills of water from a small glass tumbler that had, in a previous incarnation, been a little mustard jar or a Nutella pot, but the hardworking little receptacle was now empty. And her headache was getting worse.

What time was it? She could hear music below her, though not as loud as it had been when she’d taken herself off to bed. When Effie had tossed the bouquet, which she’d been using as a microphone, out onto the patio with a manic glint in her eye, Anna had known it was time to turn in: things would only get messier from here.

A stream of bubbles moved from her stomach to her chest in protest as she stretched, and she rummaged in her bag once more for the milky indigestion fix she had become semi-addicted to during her pregnancy.

I need to get some more water.

Lucky she was still wearing all her clothes. Quite practical, really.

Oh God. I am shit-faced.

The corridor beyond her room was dark, the door of the bathroom nearest to her locked; a slew of snores came in response when she knocked. Down the hallway, light from downstairs bled up to the landing along with the music. Slower now, less frantic. Almost beguiling.

Anna had cared about music once. Never quite as much as Steve, but then it was his job to know the new and the edgy, the cult classics and all the lore that came with them. He’d introduced her to so many bands to love, so many songs that spoke to her soul, just like he had when they first met.

Where was he?

Passed out somewhere probably, and she caught the habitual snarl of contempt before it spread across her lips with the memory that she too had just woken up facedown with the lights on. She hiccuped.

Did I really just wake up a few minutes ago? Or was it more like an hour?

It was late, but it might also have been early. The sky was dark, but somebody was still up, partying. Over the music she could hear voices downstairs. Which was where she supposed she’d have to go for some water now.

Don’t accept any more shots from Ben. Do not engage with Charlie.

Where is