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

set of circumstances. Real life was enough if what was at the heart of it was sturdy and good.

That was when I should have sent the message. The next time Ben got in touch to ask what I was doing, where I was—invariably in bed as I caught up on messages after another weekend spent with Dan—and whether I’d like to send him another picture. But I didn’t.

I enjoyed chatting with him. He was clever, he made me laugh and squirm and feel like that girl in the sky instead of the one back behind a desk in Soho. I thought Dan was wonderful, but we were two weeks, three weeks, four weeks in—I’d been on enough dates before to know that, after any night out with Dan, there was still a high chance that he would simply drift off the radar, never text me back, blank my attempts to get in touch with him. With Ben, though, there had been what some people (not me: too jaded) might have called “a connection.”

I knew I had a propensity to breathlessness over this sort of thing—God knows I had learned that much along with literature and rhetoric at Cambridge—but, over the month or so since I’d been back, my brain had started referring to Ben as the One. I was counting the days, the hours, until my plane took off and I would see him again.

Until I wasn’t. Ben and I celebrated a month since we’d met with a meal over FaceTime—lunch for me and dinner for him—but a week later, he stopped responding to my texts. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first—he was busy at work, he’d told me—but then I didn’t hear from him for full weekends at a time. Weekends I was now spending mostly with Dan.

When I’d check in with Ben the following Monday, he either couldn’t take my calls or seemed distracted. Then five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks with Dan—finally I sent the message when, after two months of being together most days and most nights, Dan told me that he loved me.

“Ben, I’m so sorry but I’ve met someone and I think he might be the real deal.”

It was two days before my plane took off, and I knew then that I wouldn’t be on it when it did.

At first he was jocular, mock indignant down the line: “There aren’t any skyscrapers as tall as mine in London.”

Then a little hurt, and almost persuasive. But, when I didn’t budge, he was short. Terse and sharp.

“Fine then, have a great life.”

I felt bad letting him down, but he clearly had a busy schedule out there and I’d been clinging to him through my phone the way I had with Guy before him. With Dan I was out in the world, smelling and tasting it like a whole, present person. A happy person. Someone with a future.

That, I thought, was the end of our story—until, of course, I turned the page on the most exciting chapter of the new one I was telling.

42. Effie

The library was still dark and cool, the night air not yet chased away. After Anna pulled Lizzie into the room, Effie closed the solid door carefully and stood, sad to feel awkward among her closest companions and unsure how to interact with either of them.

Anna seemed so cold, and Lizzie…Lizzie seemed as though she were on another planet, either with fear or the sheer unrecognizable, unreachable remoteness that so often veiled her features these days. They had barely spent any time alone together as a three so far this trip, and even now as they stood together, Lizzie still seemed to be somewhere else, far, far away behind features so closed they might as well have been the château’s studded and impregnable front door.

If Ben was the man she had come home from Thailand so hung up on, what Anna had seen made even more sense. Perhaps it was his arrival, and the revelation of what had gone on between him and Lizzie, that had tipped Dan from supportive fiancé to jealous, coercive bully.

“Right.” Effie felt a pulse behind her eye begin to flicker like a faulty connection. “Lizzie, you need to explain yourself. Is Ben Bangkok?”

Lizzie slumped as if the air had been drawn out of her with bellows. “Yes,” she said simply.

Effie knew her friend’s talent for self-justification, but her skin had grown thick to it over the years. Lapses in judgment, moments of thoughtlessness—these were forgivable along the bumpy and uneven road female friendships often take, but all-out betrayal would be hard to bounce back from.

“Anna saw you, Lizzie,” Effie continued. “On the wedding night. With Ben.”

No space for ambiguity: time for answers.

“We had to discuss something,” Lizzie replied quickly. “It was to do with the wedding and all the stuff that arrived. I thought he had canceled lots of it, I wanted to know what happened…”

But the words tumbled into the vacuum like snow onto a wet pavement; there was nothing for them to stick to, nothing to keep them solid or real, and they melted away.

When Effie spoke again, her voice splintered just as her throat did under the crushing realization of what Lizzie’s next answer might mean for their friendship.

“You have got to tell me what’s going on, Lizzie,” Effie demanded, almost breathless with the weight of tears held back. “Are you and he…Are you…Have you been cheating on Dan with Ben? Are you two together?”

The air Lizzie hadn’t been able to breathe in moments ago whooshed out of her now instead, and as her frame sagged, Anna’s grip seemed to be the only thing holding her up on the thin legs beneath her nightgown.

“Yes,” she said, not without difficulty. “That’s right.”

Effie staggered backward and leaned her weight against a sturdy wooden writing desk; she felt shame all over her, an extra layer she was now forced to wear despite the heat. She had either