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

to seem almost shifty. Effie was surprised to find that her sympathies lay not entirely with the frantic-looking man on the terrace but with Lizzie as well; despite the rift between the two of them, she wouldn’t have wished this awful scene on her.

“Lizzie, be careful. Stay back!” Ben reached a hand to Lizzie’s shoulder as she stepped away from the table and toward Dan. “You don’t know what he might do!”

She was now equidistant between the two men, contemplating her choices, the way her life might pan out. The midpoint, the most dangerous spot on any tightrope walk. Between Dan’s zeal and Ben’s studied calm, Lizzie exuded a nervy fatigue with it all: the jangling exhaustion of someone who hadn’t slept well for months.

“Oh, stop it, Ben,” she said. She sounded weary, but her voice for the first time that week was steady and free of tears. “I’m not taking orders from you anymore. Leave Dan out of it.”

Ben bristled, the concerned expression wiped clean from his face and replaced with another: mounting irritation.

“What is going on, Lizzie?” Bertie’s kind face was a haze of confusion and unease.

Lizzie stepped farther from Ben, one more pace toward her former fiancé. “Ben is the real monster in all this, not Dan,” she said, looking into Dan’s eyes.

There was a shift around the table, although nobody appeared to move—a wobble in alertness, as if a predator had attempted a feint. The group sat rigidly in their chairs like a rabbit watched by a fox.

“Hang on,” began Charlie, rising from the table now too. “What about what you said about Dan—the control, the abuse—”

“Is absolutely not true in the slightest,” Lizzie said. “Ben made it all up.”

“I found it all on his computer,” Dan spat, his face purpling with the force of conflicting emotions, tangled loyalties. “Actually, I found it all on yours”—he turned to Lizzie—“and then looked for the truth on yours.” He whipped his head back to Ben.

“I’ve been staying at Ben’s while I move out,” Dan explained, his face softening as he spoke to the woman he had asked to marry him. “I was round at ours packing up my stuff, and I needed to use the computer—when I opened it, your email was open, and—I’m sorry, Lizbet, but I looked. I thought maybe you’d started seeing someone else.”

Dan’s voice cracked—Lizzie, eyes closed, looked as though someone had pulled out her heart and stamped on it, Effie thought—but he straightened his shoulders once more, cleared his throat. The anger returned.

“I just wanted to know,” he said. “So I looked at everything.”

Dan’s voice, as he explained what he’d found, was quieter now, softer and less brutally torn from him by the emotions that still pulsed beneath his skin and made one of his eyelids flicker irregularly.

He told them how he had then logged on to his oldest friend’s laptop, surprised that Ben hadn’t taken it with him on the sudden business trip that had come up in the wake of the wedding having been canceled, but had left it in the flat where he, Dan, was staying to ride out the heartbreak of having been jilted by the most wonderful woman he had ever met.

Anna shifted in her seat. The poor guy looked harrowed by the discovery of Lizzie and Ben’s secret love. “Do you want to sit down, Dan? Want a drink?”

“No,” he replied steadily. “I just want the truth out in the open.”

“Do you want to do this inside, mate?” suggested Ben, florid from the wine and in rude health from the sun, whereas Dan was pale and tired. “In private?”

But Dan only laughed cynically. “No thanks, I don’t think you can demand privacy from anyone anymore.”

Where she still stood between them, her dress billowing like the sails of a ship in rough seas caught between two ports, Lizzie’s eyes clicked open like a porcelain doll’s, from resigned despair to determination. She turned back toward the table.

“Ben has been blackmailing me for months,” she said. “He has…some photos that I didn’t want to get out.”

55. Anna

Over the scorching reverb of the crickets and the flutter of moths’ wings against the lanterns that still flickered around the dinner table, Dan began to describe what he had found in his bride-to-be’s in-box: a folder marked with an asterisk, full of emails from Ben.

Scrolling down the list, Dan had seen an attachment—a fuzzy picture, sent from his oldest friend to his would-be wife. He had felt the bone-chilling, finger-numbing onset of heartache, jealousy, impotent and embarrassed rage. A man scorned, a man tricked: his best mate and his girlfriend, the oldest one in the book.

But then he had read what else the messages contained—threats and begging notes, manipulation dressed up as a grand love affair—and he had gone back to Ben’s flat, its keys on loan and in his pocket, and looked on his friend’s computer too.

“You gave me the password in case I needed to use it,” Dan scoffed at the man across the table, who remained silent, expressionless. “You didn’t think I was even a threat.”

Ben smirked. Anna shifted her weight uncomfortably in her chair. By guessing it all wrong, she had only isolated Lizzie further in her attempts to protect Effie.

On Ben’s laptop, among the computer games and the corporate training modules, Dan—a man who ran audits of people’s lives for a living—had found another folder, one packed with grainy images, stolen moments, of limbs entangled and bare skin, cherubs in repose. A hundred or so. Long-haired, short-haired, slim, stocky, tall, short, their skin golden or black or white. All hair colors, and all eye colors too, he supposed, except they were all asleep when the photos had been taken. A diary of sorts, a catalog.

An unknown and unauthorized portrait of every woman Ben had spent a night with.

“You fucking creep,” Iso said, looking up, appalled and in revulsion, at the handsome man standing next to her. Her words broke the