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

and put her cutlery down. She had hardly touched her food as it was. After a week of tragic-heroine rations, she was looking weak and drawn, sadness and worry having taken their toll on her beauty.

“No, no,” said Anna, looking past Bertie’s shoulder into the darkness. “I can see something, too.”

The sunsets over the château were stately, bejeweled affairs, but when they were over, night thudded in with a quick and inky intensity. Besides the few lights in the valley, there was nothing much to leaven the vast emptiness beneath them.

Across the terrace from the Hall doors, just visible in front of the valley view, the pool lights were still on, which made looking beyond them or around them difficult in the dazzle, but slowly—uncertainly, and wary of upsetting the gathering—Anna made out a shape. Just to the right of the water’s edge, between it and the far corner of the quad they sat in. Still some distance away but steadily approaching.

A figure. A man.

The silhouette was breathing heavily, it seemed, shoulders heaving in time with its steps and the effort of drawing breath.

“Oui, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What’s going on?

Bertie’s tone was new, its friendliness and natural generosity exchanged for a sharp alertness. His voice sounded thicker than usual and came from higher in his throat as the adrenaline flowed.

Lizzie leaped up from her chair and spun in the direction he was looking. Her eyes peered through the beams and strained into the blackness around them. The lights were blinding the figures at the table even as they lit up the group perfectly for their guest.

Anna clutched Steve’s arm in fright—even he was tense like taut elastic, humming with nervous energy.

We are in France, not a horror film; we are in France, not a horror film.

Finally, the shape detached from the beam of the pool spotlights behind it and stepped toward the group. Closer now, and closer again, the crunching gravel testified footfall by slow footfall its progress toward the table, where plates had been forgotten, wineglasses untouched, forkfuls of food en route to mouths laid down.

“Have you told them the truth yet? Have you?”

The sound of Dan’s voice came hoarse and scratchy to them through the velvety night.

51. Lizzie

He was here. The man I’d exchanged my future with in order to save my best friend.

Hearing his voice brought all the love and the hope that had been gradually leached from my life over the last few months roaring back, like when the Technicolor washes over after Dorothy lands in Oz.

My heart buoyed, then plummeted in fear. What if Dan made things worse?

He looked dusty and travel-weary—angry, too. He had every right to be; I wondered whether he was still cross with me for disappearing or whether…I didn’t dare hope he might have worked out who should really be in the firing line for his rage.

If I canceled the wedding, Ben had told me, all the pictures he had would be gone. Once I’d clicked Send on those emails ending my and Dan’s future together, Effie would be beyond his grasp, and I would be free. Heartbroken, but free.

The photos Ben had been sending me for the past few months might have made for some coarse remarks in the kitchen at work, a few choice comments in the pub. Mortifying, but then again, there aren’t many virgins working in advertising.

The ones he had taken of Effie these last weeks, however…It would mean the end not only of her livelihood but of her professional life. One does not become headmistress of a school like Coral Hill Prep—or any other in that bracket, for that matter—if there is even a hint of a smudge on one’s gleaming reputation. There would be no coming back from a dirty, permanent, internet-eternal blot like this. Those pictures would have ended her beloved career. They simply had to be destroyed—otherwise, her life would be.

If I had to suffer the loss of a man I had thought I might grow old with to save my friend, I would. Effie, the woman who had not only brought me back from the dead all those years ago but had made sure I was equipped for the rest of my life too.

The agony, though. The sheer gut-punching agony of deliberately wounding the people I loved the most: first Dan, as I pushed him away and out of my life; now Effie and, by extension, Anna too. Because of the nature of the wedge Ben had so carefully, so deliberately, with such cold efficiency, driven between us—the photos of Effie that nobody must ever see—she would never even know why I had been so cruel.

If the past six months hadn’t already felt like a slow trickle of poison into my veins, that in itself would have been the death blow. I’d felt hollow and empty; I thought my own pain would finish me off. That was Ben’s price for saving the best friend I’d ever had. That was the deal I had made with him.

But the moment I saw him at the airport, I realized he hadn’t stuck to his end of the bargain. Now I began to wonder why on earth I should either.

52. Anna

Disheveled and dusty, the groom stood there, his very presence a rebuke to the food they had prepared, the crisp wine they were washing it all down with. It was his hospitality they were enjoying; he had paid for everything. Anna saw Bertie look awkwardly at his feet, then scowl as he remembered the threat Dan posed to his cousin.

He had come round the corner Lizzie was supposed to, dressed in long ivory silk, hair gently tonged to perfection and a bouquet in her manicured hands, ready to walk up the aisle and take her vows in front of the Hall’s French doors. Congregations sit patiently for brides on their special day, an indulgence of their last girlish foible,