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

flat on the most superficial level, meaning his underwear was no longer there but his books and CDs were. Effie remembered this stage from when James left: every well-thumbed page, creased spine, and half-remembered romantic lyric was a ghost in the room, each a soft-focus Then that existed in filmic palimpsest with the shitty, unflatteringly lit Now. She’d thought that stage was bad, but she had found the empty spaces on the shelves once they had been removed even worse.

“Spray his belongings with your favorite perfume before you hand them over,” Cosmo had educated them all as teenagers. “He’ll be overwhelmed with memories and want you back.”

It hadn’t worked for Effie; it had just made James cough.

Lizzie had been distant and distracted when Effie arrived—but that was to be expected. Effie knew how having your life canceled without notice could change a person. She had tried her best to persuade Lizzie to come on the holiday with the rest of them, to spend what would surely be the most difficult week of her life with the people who knew her best—but Lizzie had been reticent. Even talking about the place she should have been married in had made her cry fresh tears.

“I can’t, Eff,” she’d sputtered into a tissue. “It would be all I thought about.”

“But won’t you be thinking about it here too?” Effie had gestured around the empty flat. “You’d be surrounded by your friends there—here you’ll just be by yourself, wondering when Dan’s next coming round to pick up his stuff.”

Eventually Lizzie had acquiesced: she would come with them to the Oratoire de St. Eris, the place she had chosen as backdrop for her future with Dan now recast as square one in the new journey her life would take.

Effie had been glad. As the single elder stateswoman, she knew the importance of company, and she’d wanted to make sure Lizzie would have it on request. Before she’d left the flat that evening, Effie had even offered to stay the night, but her friend had waved her off from the front step. As she walked away down the road, Effie had guiltily admitted to herself that the prospect of one more friend—one more than none—whose future felt that little bit less mapped out had felt reassuring. It had been a little soon to make the point to Lizzie that they would have each other, just as it felt a little soon to press Ben on the specifics of whatever it was they had together.

Effie had gone straight from there to the pub to meet him—not that she had told Lizzie that. Effie knew that, eventually, Lizzie would be delighted for her and for Ben—she knew how difficult Effie had found the past six months; but the news that a friend is having depression-busting, chandelier-rattling sex with your ex’s best mate wasn’t exactly what Lizzie needed to hear right then. Effie felt more reckless and spontaneous with Ben than she ever had done with James; that night, flush-faced and with a corona of pillow-static hair, she had told him of the plan to whisk Lizzie away with them, to soothe the rawness of her hurt with the company of her oldest friends.

The last six months hadn’t been difficult for just Effie. She and Anna had noticed a transformation in their friend over that time too. Lizzie had always been strong-minded and successful; she spent her days making the sort of trailblazing adverts that talking heads ended up commenting on in state-of-the-nation clip shows. She knew her rights and her worth like she did her target demographics, but she had surprised both of them by diving into the planning of her “Big Day” like a Victorian wallflower working on her trousseau.

These days, they met up less frequently than they had in their twenties and, just like their drinks when they did, their time together felt watered down. In recent months, Lizzie had been quieter than usual—withdrawn, almost—and, when Effie and Anna had managed to coax her out of herself, able to talk of little other than the wedding. She asked their advice about readings, place settings, and favors, with none of the sarcasm Effie might have overlaid or Anna’s resentment at how much time her own nuptials had taken up. Lizzie was almost obsessive about the wedding—to the exclusion of her old personality, in fact.

But she didn’t seem excited about it, either. Lizzie’s wasn’t the sort of bridezilla monomania or self-importance that bulldozed or hijacked every other topic of conversation between the three of them. It seemed as though she couldn’t let herself talk about anything else, didn’t trust herself to. When Effie and Anna shared stories about what sort of day they’d both had, what their weekends looked like, Lizzie simply shrank into the cushions of whatever sofa they were sitting on or remained blank across the table they sat at.

Effie had first noticed it after the engagement party: Lizzie had become so bland, so docile. A blushing bride but somehow lacking in enthusiasm too. Lizzie was no longer mischievous; she no longer laughed. She had once called something “wedmin” over brunch (Effie watched Anna repress a shudder), without even pausing to pull a face.

Lizzie had deployed the same determination she always brought to all things professional and planned the wedding like an automaton: the dress had been chosen with minimum fuss (neither Effie nor Anna had been invited along); the venue—lavish and far away—decided on swiftly and without too much agonizing. The invitation, a hand-finished fold-out card filled with multiple inserts detailing logistics and a single sprig of Provençal lavender, had arrived with little pomp and just the right amount of ceremony. Lizzie had diligently—robotically, even—gotten on with all of it.

So what had changed her mind?

4. Anna

“She didn’t want to talk about it.” Effie’s voice from the back of the car wavered slightly with an emotion that Anna knew her fragile friend shared. As much as her heart went