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

but the groom must be prompt and punctual. A groom must endure his bride’s lateness right at the front, with several hundred eyes fastened onto his back. Instead, the group at the table stared into Dan’s face, right into his eyes.

As he came closer, they could see tears glistening in his eyes. He wrung his hands together as though trying to pray, and there were scratches along the length of his shins, bare beneath his mud-streaked shorts. There was pain in his eyes, but wildness seemed to simmer there too, a spark about to fly. He staggered across the flagstones to them like a man wounded. Anna looked for blood or an injury, but his hurt was on the inside and stung all the more for it.

“Dan!” Effie cried, as if roused from a stupor, her eyes now flitting between Lizzie’s and Ben’s faces around the table, even though Anna knew her friend had been avoiding looking their way. “My God…Dan!”

Anna could see a glint of satisfaction in her friend’s face that the clandestine couple might yet be publicly dressed down.

“Hello, mate.” Charlie rose warily from his seat, still chewing a mouthful of food. “What can we do you for?”

Across the table, Steve began to stand too, and Bertie. Ben, meanwhile, remained in his seat, wearing an expression of amused disbelief and with it—was it really?—an idiotic sort of smirk, as though tickled by the turn of events.

“Stop where you are, please,” the bride’s cousin called into the darkness toward the groom. “Or we’ll call the police.”

This time it was Dan’s turn to be amused. “How?” he laughed wryly. “You know Lizzie and I chose this place because you can’t get a phone line out of here to anywhere. You couldn’t call the police even if you knew who it was you should be calling them about.”

“Dan, please.” Lizzie’s floral dress billowed slightly as she stood and moved toward him: one arm reached out, her palm wide in a stop sign. Her voice was sorrowful but final. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I came to tell you all the truth,” he replied, calmer now and his breath less ragged. He swayed slightly in the gloom and turned his own palms to the sky: a question, a plea.

“Why don’t you come and—” Instinctively, Anna tried to make a space for him at the table, but Steve put a hand on her shoulder, and she stopped.

The tears on Lizzie’s face welled from her eyes in rivulets and ran down her cheeks like the first raindrops on glass. “It will be so much worse if you go through with this, Dan. Please.”

He bristled, pulled himself upright from where he had wilted in sadness and seeming exhaustion. He walked taller now, continued his slow steps toward where they sat, waiting for stage directions.

“I have all the pictures,” he spat, pointing a finger at Lizzie where she stood in front of the table, at its head like an honored guest. She closed her eyes as the words hit her—not in a blink but in a death-mask’s expression of resignation at forces beyond her control.

“I have all the pictures and I am going to finish this.”

53. Lizzie

I saw a couple of the photos—not out of curiosity, you understand, but because Ben sent them to me to threaten and blackmail, prove he wasn’t bluffing. I closed the images almost as soon as I had clicked on them, as soon as I realized what they were. The knowledge that I was no longer in charge of just my own fate hit me like a bus; I felt like my heart was beating outside my body.

But I had seen enough to feel briefly—so briefly—proud of my friend. Go, girl, I thought madly, paying no heed yet to the consequences.

Because she looked like she was having a great time—and for the first time, I’d wager. Certainly since awful, drippy James, who had never really valued her, never adored her the way she deserved. Never made her feel beautiful, either. What a shame that it had taken a man like Ben to make her realize that she was.

That was when I became determined to untangle her from the mess I’d made of my own life so she could carry on feeling beautiful, meet someone else if she wanted to, have their children if she felt like it. Raise all those little girls at her school to be better at looking after themselves than I had proved to be.

I almost sent those emails canceling my wedding with a smile on my face—even though, inside, I thought I might not survive the loss.

I had to do this for Effie, because of what she had done for me.

54. Effie

Pictures? What pictures?

Effie could see Lizzie’s desperation to shut her former fiancé up.

“You shit!” Dan suddenly shouted, flecks of spit flying from his mouth and landing in the lavender beds. “You utter, utter shit!”

On the other side of the table from Lizzie, the true target of Dan’s wobbling pointed finger stood up: Ben. His chair rasped on the stone as he pushed it back behind him, hands spread in front of him as if fighting flames.

“Mate,” he tried nervously. “Buddy, slow down.”

Effie turned her head to him so quickly her neck cricked in protest. Anna’s eyes flew over too. His usual can-do slickness and easy charm were crumbling under Dan’s reproachful anger.

“You see what he’s really like?” Ben said shakily, glancing around the table.

It was true: Dan, dusty and half-crazed on the grounds of what should have been his wedding venue, seemed a darker and more savage shade of his usual buttoned-up accountant self. But there was something to the heat of his anger that spoke of genuine and irrepressible emotion, Effie thought; nothing cruel or calculated, the way Ben had described him yesterday.

Ben, on the other hand…Ben, who despite arriving with Effie now intended to leave with Lizzie—his smoothness had begun