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

with looking over my shoulder, with trying to reason with him, with the endlessness of it. The remorseless pursuit. I could see Dan’s giant heart trying to puzzle out whether he’d done anything wrong.

Ben would show me fragments of the other pictures, cropped and indistinct: the curve of a waist here, a bare thigh there. How drunk had I been that this man had arranged me like flowers in a vase and snap-snap-snapped my life away as I slept? I barely remember closing my eyes that night in Bangkok, but I must have been out for a while, because he seemed to have at least a hundred shots.

“There are more,” he’d always say. “Do you want your family to see them?”

That was what had stopped me from taking a stand against him. The shame. The eyes. The pixels and the pupils of other people gazing at them—at me. Their screen-lit faces and shocked curiosity. But the more I thought about it, the less guilt I felt—if Ben shared those pictures, he would be the one at fault, not me. I would be the victim. And once they were out there, perhaps I would be free.

It would be mortifying, of course—at no point did I particularly relish the idea of my family, friends, and colleagues ever seeing them. But my parents were pretty liberal, my friends were hardly prudes—and my colleagues…I worked in a boozy, licentious ad agency, where hands roamed free and extramarital slipups were common. Nude photos of me might provoke some comments, but they’d hardly start a moral panic.

So I called him on it. One night when he cornered me as I left to get the tube. I had decided to take the direct way home, rather than skulking through backstreets and choosing roundabout bus routes to avoid him.

“Leave me alone,” I said, trying to steady my wobbling voice. “If you don’t, I’m going to tell Dan everything. You can do your worst—I don’t care anymore.”

He laughed at me, tried to style it out. He tried to mask the surprise in his eyes with mockery, but I saw what lay beneath it: failure. He had banked on me being too afraid, and now his plan had hit a wall. I mentally scrubbed his name off my guest list, my seating plan, my future. On the way home, I felt so light that I smiled at other Londoners on the train, and they looked at me as though I were mad. Perhaps I had been.

That was the evening Ben got in touch with Effie.

That was why there had to be no more useless crying now. No more cowering, knowing he was listening to my sobs from the other side of my door. I had to wrest something back, find some kind of justice before it was too late.

49. Anna

The bride appeared at the top of the stairs that evening, pale and wan. Even though Ben was standing right behind her, Lizzie had never looked so solitary.

The others ferried plates, serving spoons, and glassware from the kitchen to the table and laid it beneath the evening’s first glimmers of stars. The lavender tang that had infused their stay was at its most heightened at this time of day, and the note crept inside the Hall like an extra guest.

Anna wondered whether she would ever be able to smell it again without thinking back to this moment: their final night of the holiday and the one when a friendship had come to an end.

Ben hadn’t even attempted to talk to Effie since the conversation in the library. Instead, by the time she had finished crying on Anna’s shoulder—not just over him, Anna understood, but for all the other bodies she’d tried to find solace in among the rubble of her self-confidence—the door to Lizzie’s room was shut once more and he was nowhere else to be found around the château. What more was there to say?

As Ben appeared now with Lizzie on the stairs, one hand on the small of her back as she descended, he didn’t even appear embarrassed—although, Anna noted spitefully, Lizzie didn’t look as happy as she should, given how things had worked out.

Would they be going on Lizzie and Dan’s paid-for honeymoon next week too?

“There you are!” Charlie’s bright face appeared below from the kitchen doorway, but his smiled slipped when he noticed the body language between the couple on the stairs—and Effie watching them balefully from just beyond the double doors. “We’re, um, nearly ready with the food.”

He ducked back through the archway, quickly replaced by Iso, whose watchful dark eyes followed Lizzie and Ben across the Hall. Anna tugged on Effie’s arm and brought her back out to the bench on which she and Bertie had been folding napkins and polishing smudges from wineglasses, so she wouldn’t have to see. Lizzie’s cousin was sipping from a small, lurid goblet in front of him on the table.

Under her hand, Anna felt Effie’s tremor of sadness at the scene, as if taken from a parallel version of this trip where happiness and camaraderie might have dominated, rather than isolation and menace. Every one of the Oratoire’s inhabitants wore a now-constant expression of expectant worry—as they all had since the wedding night, as though it had been smuggled into their suitcases along with their bathing suits.

“Pastis!” Anna cried, but she refused Bertie’s offer to pour her one with a mock shudder. “Too strong for me, but let’s have a sniff.”

The licorice scent rose from the glass he offered like fumes, and she breathed in its deceptively sweet vapor like a fin de siècle lush. Once, she might have inhaled far more of it than that, but this trip had turned out to be a lesson in moderation as well as self-discovery.

The renewal Anna had hoped for had come not, as she had supposed, in nightly boisterousness and the retreading of old drunken jokes but in her capacity to say no