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

in the village—there was no crisis serious enough, apparently, to distract either from the breakfast order or the ritualistic way in which they had all begun to congregate for it, as though they had been living here together for years.

A few paces away, Lizzie, wearing an unzipped gray hoodie over her white nightgown, pressed both palms to her forehead. Her long fingers splayed, taut and white, over her loose blond hair. Next to her, Ben reached out an arm, as if he could help stop her panicked and rushing thoughts, but she barely seemed to notice him.

“It’s okay,” he was saying, to her but as much to the assembled group, too. “It wasn’t him.”

His eyes flicked upward to where the two women stood. “False alarm!” he called.

“What was a false alarm?” asked Effie, walking toward him warily.

“Iso thought she saw Dan this morning,” Bertie explained. “She went out for a run and saw a car pull up at the house—”

“Here?” Anna interrupted incredulously. “This morning?”

“Sorry,” mumbled Iso. “I panicked, assumed it was him.”

“—but Ben’s just been out there, driven around a bit,” Bertie finished. “Looks like it was just somebody who’d got lost and needed directions.”

“Not that I knew the way either!” Ben shrugged, holding his hands out at his sides: nothing to see here. Effie looked at the thickness of his forearms, the very breadth of him, and felt her stomach crease.

Farther off, she saw Iso braced, feet wide and slightly hunched, in front of the double doors, still cooling down. She was wearing a pair of fluorescent snake-print leggings and a matching bra top that Effie recognized from a nosy, listless scroll through her Instagram feed, courtesy of the local café’s Wi-Fi the other day. Part of a paid partnership with an exercise brand keen to empower those with low confidence by enlisting very thin, very beautiful women who wore makeup even to go running.

“You’ve never even met Dan, have you, Iso?” she said, closing the distance between them. “How would you have known it was him?”

Iso shrugged, her thick brown ponytail slipping from one shoulder to hang down the middle of her back, and dabbed at her face with the back of one hand.

“I wasn’t sure,” she admitted, suddenly bashful. “I suppose I’m just on edge, like everyone else.”

Effie spun around to meet Anna’s gaze, and they rolled their eyes in sync. She looked to Lizzie, but the other woman was still standing nervously to one side, worrying a loose thread on the sleeve of her hooded top.

Wait. Anna mouthed the word to Effie: they needed Lizzie alone before they could ask her anything about Ben. Alone, and calm.

The group moved outside to the table on the terrace and took their seats around the morning spread, reaching for bread, picking at fruit. But Lizzie sat motionless. Her hard stare traveled into the azure distance, taking in scenery not of the local paysage but from months gone by. Action played out in the home she had shared with Dan, their kitchen, their bedroom. Scenes of love and scenes of pain.

“Why don’t I just try calling him again?” Ben suggested.

Whatever it was that Lizzie seemed anxiously trying to mouth wouldn’t come out properly.

Scraping his chair back on the stone and walking toward the pool, Ben held his phone high in the morning sunshine, swiveling this way and that as a water diviner uses his rods.

Charlie smirked and rolled his eyes. “Seriously mate, there’s no—”

But Ben’s face lit up as the screen in his hand did. “Found it!” he called, rooted to the spot, the backdrop of the valley behind him. The others gaped; Iso rummaged excitedly in her runner’s belt for her own phone.

“Not much, but…” Ben swiped to call. “It’s ringing!”

They sat expectantly back in their chairs and watched him.

“Dan, mate,” Ben said, and Lizzie gave a start. But as he talked, silhouetted against the landscape with the sun behind him, it was clear that the erstwhile best man was leaving a voicemail rather than speaking to his friend.

“Bit worried about you, old man,” he continued. “Are you in France, mate? Thought I saw you yesterday. Just give me a text, let me know you’re okay. Always here, buddy. Bye.”

Ben clicked the phone into darkness once more and returned to the table, where he picked up a plate and surveyed the food.

As though the call he’d just made had been a routine inquiry with his bank.

Effie—nursing a cup of black coffee and nothing else—knew that Bertie would strike up a conversation to take the pressure off the rather strained breakfast gathering even before he had opened his mouth.

“You said the other night you used to work abroad, Ben,” he began. “Did you enjoy it?”

“Oh yeah, mate, expat life’s the best,” Ben replied, dropping a napkin onto his lap and breaking the end off a baguette. “Never quite feels like real life, even when you’re working like a dog.”

“You’re right about that,” agreed Bertie, “but I think that’s what I miss most—reality.”

“Where were you based, Ben?” Anna asked, a table’s length away. “You’d only just come back when I first met you at the en—” At this Lizzie’s eyes flew up, but Anna stopped herself just in time. “At the party.”

“That’s right, yeah.” Ben nodded and swallowed a swig of water. “I’d been away for a couple of years by then, but I was in Bangkok. Loved every minute.”

In the shade of the table’s parasol and from a habit honed over a decade spent in each other’s company, Effie’s and Anna’s eyes met and they exchanged the same thought: Oh.

When they looked to Lizzie, her eyes were already fastened, glintingly, on their faces.

Anna stood and wrapped one hand tightly around the bride’s wrist. A little too tightly.

“Lizzie, I think you need to come with us,” she said briskly, gesturing back toward the Hall—adding, when Ben made to move to accompany them: “Not you, thanks, not just now. Effie—come on.”

They left the others to their croissants.