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

empty glass against the wall, but then she saw, on the table in front of her, something pure, white, and inviting. She could spoil things too.

CONGRATULATIONS, she scrawled in unsteady block capitals. YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER.

Anna stole clumsily back up the stairs, sick with her own naïveté, and along the landing, grateful for the fact that whoever had been in the bathroom was now not. She filled her little glass up at least seventeen times before climbing back into bed.

This time, she put her nightie on and turned the light off, and the questions already forming in her mind were smothered by the sort of dense and insulating sleep for which Anna so often envied both her husband and her son.

39. Six Months Earlier: Lizzie

I was regaling a group of Dan’s colleagues with the story of how we met when he first introduced me to Ben at our engagement party.

The three women crowding around me in an eager semicircle were all single, and as they listened, they each wore the anxious, strained look I’d seen most recently on Effie’s face—as though they had a train to catch but none of them knew which station it was leaving from. Perhaps that’s cruel; I know the feeling too. The sensation of seconds passing and everybody else’s glass being topped up with happiness. The notion that it might run out before the waiter got to me, my glass, at the other end of the table. Perhaps that feeling was the reason I rushed in so quickly when I got the chance.

I was describing to the women my surprise at Dan and I having matched with such ease after my rather depressing experience of the other profiles on most dating apps—I tended to ham up this part in my telling of it, obnoxious in my own happiness, reveling in my delight at having scooped the prize—when I felt a tap on my shoulder. My fiancé.

“Do excuse me,” I simpered to the women, and spun around to look at the face of my forever.

Both versions of it.

There was a moment inside me like a fuse had blown. Even thinking about it brings back the sensation, weaker now, like ripples fading but reverberating still from those few seconds of intensity—the power outage in my brain—and what had caused them.

The lights, the music, the buzz of chatter—all dimmed, it seemed to me, for a few seconds before returning, even brighter, even louder. My whole body throbbed with it. I felt like static on a television screen; white noise coursed through me.

Ben. That face, his slow smile. My stomach churned. I felt in those seconds the weight of every year he and Dan had known each other, every second they had spent in each other’s company, every laugh shared, every secret. Their life together—some twenty years or so—was a marriage in itself.

Was this how I would feel every day, every time my husband mentioned his oldest friend? How would it be when Ben came round for dinner, played with our children? Would this infatuated churn be there still? Would it last another forty years?

“Allow me to introduce you to—” Dan was talking, but I heard his voice as if he were behind several panes of glass. He was chatting as though I were still standing next to him at a party—our party—when really I was underwater, out of air and sinking fast.

When Ben cut in and interrupted the man I was going to marry, his voice—a well-formed baritone that made my skin vibrate and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up—was as clear as a clarion, the only thing I had heard properly for hours. Days. Years. As though I had woken up from a coma and his was the first voice carried on the air to me.

His eyes laughed at me, but warmly and with affection. In my turmoil I could hardly bear to accept their beam; I thought my every emotion must be visible on the surface, running across my flesh like a news ticker carrying the headlines. The dimples where his smile carved into his cheeks pricked the solid muscle walls of my heart like a pair of lethal arrows.

Ben reached his hand out to me and—taking it, shaking it—I wondered whether he was simply going to whisk me out of there and into the night.

Dan—my love and my faith, my anchor and my port in a storm—looked on merrily, delighted that the two most important parts of his life had slotted together at last.

He wasn’t to know that we had done so before, and found that we fitted almost perfectly.

Ben shook my hand, which was clammy with shock but also desire. His was warm and smooth.

Another jolt of electricity and a message carried between our roving, wonder-struck eyes like a flare shooting up from a ship’s deck: Not right now.

“Lovely to meet you, Lizzie,” he said with a grin.

40. Effie

Lizzie and Ben?

Effie skittered on flip-flopped feet in her pajamas to the door her friend had shut herself behind and Ben had slept in front of. Inside her chest, her heart pounded with the knowledge of Anna’s words, its pulse thumping in her ears and resonating through her body.

The door was open, the window too, the white voile curtains around the bed lifting gently in the warm breeze and stirring the currents in the empty room. More voices came from downstairs; behind her, Anna had caught up, her face twisted with worry. With pity. They took the last few strides along the landing toward the stairs together.

The others were standing in the Great Hall, a grouping not unlike one of Brueghel’s from the cave, only Steve carried a cafetière rather than a flagon of mead. Next to him with a stack of bowls, a tub of yogurt, and a glass jug of orange juice was Bertie. In Charlie’s hands, the usual bulging bag from the boulangerie