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

“Oh my God,” she said again. Any other words—the words she usually so prided herself on—were no longer there.

“Effie, I am so, so sorry.” Lizzie ran across the flagstones to be next to her, to hold her. “I am so sorry he came after you. I canceled the wedding so he wouldn’t use them,” Lizzie said, looking up from where she had laid her head on Effie’s shoulder. “He said he would delete them.”

Effie was a blizzard, a static hum. The reverb in her head turned up to fever pitch and then—

Effie’s stomach relaxed so suddenly she wondered whether she was going to vomit. Her muscles spasmed, then bunched again in sorrow.

“You canceled your wedding…for me?” Effie’s brown eyes were pools of gratitude and pain as she took in her friend’s ashen face next to hers.

Lizzie smiled forlornly, matched her friend tear for tear as she spoke. “How could I not, Eff? After what you did for me?”

Effie remembered typing. She remembered articulating arguments, framing quotes and ideas, as she heard her friend groaning and crying through the wall. She remembered sitting her own exams, half-waiting to be pulled out of them and interrogated for having put Lizzie’s name on an essay she had written. The many sleepless nights she’d tossed and turned ahead of their results being pinned up on the boards by the Senate House. They had gone to read them like criminals being led to the gallows.

“Effie Talbot: summa cum laude,” the lists had read. “Anna Hewitt: magna cum laude.”

Those two had never been in doubt, though.

But there, just below: “Lizzie Berkeley: magna cum laude.”

A pass, and a good one. Not what she deserved, but something she’d work the rest of her life to be worthy of.

They had backed out of the quad as though inching back along the plank and onto the ship, then headed straight to the pub. When Anna had asked her friends why they were crying so much, they’d blamed it on the cheap, acidic white wine.

As they’d graduated, kneeling in cap and gown, both Effie and Lizzie had expected the Latin-intoning scholar to break off when he reached their names and call out their wrongdoing. A month later—after the parties and the balls, the farewells and the swapping of new addresses in London—they had each gone home. Only when the doors to their parents’ homes had swung shut behind them had Effie and Lizzie finally dared to breathe out. They had gotten away with it.

It was the out-breath that had confined Lizzie to bed, however. The realization of just how wrong she had gone, how close she had swerved to ruining her life and somebody else’s. Even adoring, gentle Bertie couldn’t reason her out of the doom she was feeling.

“Maybe you’ll need to pay me back one day,” Effie had laughed, that day in Lizzie’s teenage bedroom, when she came to rouse her and set her back on the right path.

“I had to pay you back,” Lizzie whispered to her in the still French night air.

57. Effie

“You little fucker,” Anna said vehemently, breaking the stillness of the scene.

Ben smirked back at her, hands aloft in innocence. “Look, it was all consensual between two adults….I didn’t force anything—she wanted me to take those photos.”

Effie felt a kick in her stomach and a gag hacked in the back of her throat. “In private!” she screamed over Lizzie’s brown shoulder, which was—for now—keeping her safe in its embrace. “They were private!”

Her brain spun. Even if Lizzie had acquiesced to Ben, they would still be living under this shadow years later. Blackmail didn’t clear up like a thunderstorm; it lingered on like a black cloud on the horizon forever. Though Bangkok would eventually become a distant memory, the hold Ben still had over them meant Lizzie would still wake up with him in her head every morning—and so would Effie.

“I can’t let you do this for me,” she said to Lizzie. “You can’t cancel your wedding for me, for these…photos. It’s not right.”

She thought of adding yet more worry to the bustling cacophony already inside her head. “It will drive me mad. And it will break my heart to know that yours is broken too.”

Effie swallowed hard, and her skin prickled with goosebumps. “If that means those pictures come out, then at least he won’t have anything over us anymore.”

Lizzie gazed at her, eyes boring deep into Effie’s, and rested her forehead against her friend’s.

“No!” Anna shouted from across the table.

58. Anna

She had worked with clients on images such as these before—high-profile clients, rich clients, old clients, and young clients. Always women, never men, because the male physique is no sort of currency—whereas a woman’s can be both chattel and millstone.

Anna had represented women who had been forced to make the difficult choice between justice and dignity because of “evidence” their exes had had against them. Do you stand up to them and pursue them for what they owe you and your children, or do you back down because they now have the power to humiliate you on a scale more global and more infinite than our mothers could ever have imagined back when they told us to save it for someone special?

That evidence was proof of intimacy gone sadly cold and trust misplaced, not moral failing. Anna had never understood the type of man who could weaponize the reputation of somebody he had once loved like this. Who could turn blissful memories, albeit ones now laced with heartbreak, to curdled shit; could break a life with a few vengeful keystrokes and feel no qualms about doing so.

To use these intimacies, to upload and disseminate them, was a criminal act, and one these men could go to jail for—but it was more likely they’d just be made to pick up litter or clean graffiti for a couple of months. It was the woman who found herself in