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

prison, trapped in panic attacks and flashbacks, public scorn. A conviction couldn’t make the rest of the world unsee any of it.

Anna had known women destroyed by such photos, either backed into a corner and worn down like some exhausted, hunted animal or strung out across the internet like a clothesline full of dirty laundry. Even the strongest ones had several months of not being able to leave the house, then years of trauma; the weaker ones simply…gave up. The diagnosis was usually depression or anxiety, and the coroner’s report always said suicide—but neither of those was ever true: this was an act of terror, and the charge should have been murder.

Anna was not going to let that happen to Effie. “No,” she said again, quietly now.

“Ben, if you don’t delete those pictures, I will not rest until you are locked up and everyone knows what you are.” She was in courtroom mode now. “I am one of the best divorce lawyers in London, and Bertie specializes in privacy law. My firm has the resources to squash whomever you hire in defense, and I will devote every spare moment I have to making sure that you are squashed too.”

She could feel not only Effie and Lizzie staring at her in shiny-eyed awe but Steve too, and she felt a momentary flicker of something like pride: this was what she spent her time away from Sonny doing—being good at her job. In the constant negative appraisals of herself as a mother, Anna had devalued how hard she worked day after day.

Ben’s haughty expression faltered, and his strong jaw seemed to fail him for the first time, as doubt made his shoulders hunch, his neck curl back into his shoulders. He suddenly looked so much smaller, Anna thought.

Now Bertie, still in his seat, cleared his throat to speak: “Ben, whatever photos you have—in my professional opinion, I’ve got to say: Anna will eat you alive.”

“They’ll be out there though, won’t they?” he snarled. “It’ll still be too late, and everyone will have seen them—you can’t stop me doing it.”

Across the terrace, Dan’s shoulders fell. “But I deleted them,” he stuttered. “And the hard drive…I thought…”

Another scrape of a metal chair on stone and Iso stood up halfway along the table, her dark eyes flashing brighter in the fairy-light glow than even her many strands of gold jewelry and jingling earrings.

“Dan,” she said gently, “they’re all in the cloud. He still has them—but don’t worry, nobody understands how it fucking works.”

She yanked her gaze to Ben and spoke more sternly than any of them had thought she was capable of. “Look, you’re obviously a creep of the first order—we don’t need a judge’s verdict on that. Delete those pictures now, or I will make you a viral sensation tonight—and not in a good way.”

She stooped to pick up her phone from the table. “I’ve been taking pictures all week, and you’re in plenty of them. I can get your mug shot up to nearly a million people, with a description of exactly who you are and what you’ve done. You’ll be internationally hated by morning. You’ll be a Twitterstorm, a think piece. Your twisted little brain will be a discussion segment on the news.”

“I mean, technically that is defamation, Iso, and you might, er…” Bertie muttered quietly beside her.

“I don’t care,” she said to him firmly. “If you had any idea how many messages I get from girls whose boyfriends have shared pictures of them, whose friends have turned on them online. Whose phones have made them miserable. They’re a fucking disease, these things.” She slapped the one in her hand against the palm of the other. “I make a living from it, but that doesn’t mean I like what they do to people.”

She said it all without even blinking, her rage as effortlessly, authentically composed as her pictures. Iso, Anna thought, you are fucking brilliant.

“A million angry women,” she continued. “You’ll never get a date again once they know what you’re really like. Give me your phone—let’s get rid of them all, you rotten perv. What’s your passcode?”

Wordlessly Ben slid his phone from a pocket of his shorts and held it out to the indignant glamazon. When she saw he wasn’t going to move, Iso gave a snort of exasperation and walked toward him, the swish of her pale linen sundress the only noise but for the eternal cricket hum.

“Come on,” she barked at him, and Effie saw him flinch, craven before Iso despite towering over her. “What’s your passcode?”

He gave it to her, and she began flitting around the screen of his phone, nodding and tsking gently to herself as she worked. Swiping and clicking, highlighting, moving to trash, emptying and restoring factory settings until there was nothing of Effie or Lizzie—or even Ben himself—left on the phone or stored in the cloud. Iso handed it back to him.

“Fuck you,” she said politely as he took it from her.

Anna burst into applause; Lizzie gave a whoop and rushed to hug her. Effie, trembling, gripped the back of the chair where she stood and wept with gratitude, her every limb shaking with the audaciousness of Iso’s save.

“I had a feeling I was punching above my weight,” Charlie drawled, happily tone-deaf as ever and glowing with adoration.

“Without a doubt, Chaz,” Effie laughed through uncontrollable tears. “Without a doubt.”

59. Effie

Her mind, so often in a tailspin that was fueled by so many dreaded wheres and what-ifs that she was unable to answer, began clunking into motion like a well-oiled piston. Finally, Effie understood what had happened with Charlie on the wedding night.

Of course.

They had been lying there, together in the honeymoon suite, the rose petals scattered around them. The heart shape someone had carefully strewn them in had been disturbed first when they had thrown each other down on the bed in gales of laughter and then again by the rougher action afterward.

“I’ve never felt like